Mario Pinball Land (Part 1)

Oh, tabarnak... I hate this game. I hate it hate it hate it hate it hate it. Double hate it. LOATHE IT ENTIRELY.

To play such a game, it requires sheer will. It requires patience. It requires strong thumbs and index fingers. More than anything, it takes courage to face such a challenge. It takes flippers, but you know what? It also takes balls. (Mmmmmmwah! Good night everybody!) No no no, steel balls, as in, PINBALLS!

Joke aside, though, the review today is Mario Pinball Land, and just judging by this introduction, you already guessed, dear reader, that this won't be a walk in the park. No, it's Hell in Game Boy Advance game form. It's a thumb destroyer. A horrible creation that led to the uselessness of many machines. A picture of its box art should accompany the description of “frustrating” in every dictionary.

You think I'm exaggerating? No, I'm not. Not this time. I absolutely HATE this game, and here are all the reasons why.

Web Comics

Internet is huge. You can find almost everything on Internet, from the most obscure things to the more known. Internet is also known as a field for artists of all kinds. There's the famous website DeviantArt, on which you can find of everything (and I do mean everything...). Therefore, it's not a surprise that we can find absolutely impressive works of fanart on Internet. Same goes for fanfiction; whether you like it or not, fanfics are a popular way to share a story you imagined about your favorite characters.

But what to do when you both want to tell a story (or, well, jokes) but you'd rather put extra effort into it? You create a Web Comic! Literally, you write multi-panel jokes and you draw your favorite characters in each panel, and the whole point is to get a laugh from the reader.

There's a TON of web comics out there based on video games, and I'm honoring them today. Not all, this post would be too long. But at least some of them that are worthy of notice.

Is Luigi Still Overlooked?

Some guys just can't take a break. Especially in video games. When you are the character representing Player 2 (when there's even a P2 to begin with), of course you're not going to be seen very often. It's pretty sad for the goofball of the Mario series, Mario's brother Luigi. It's his life's story to be option number two, while Mario always takes the number one spot.

2013 is the Year of Luigi, because Luigi appeared for the first time in the arcade game Wrecking Crew, which came out in 1983. It's been thirty years this year. Cool for him, except the poor guy still can't get enough recognition. Always in his brother's shadow, Luigi is really in a pitiful situation.

Despite this year's celebration of the green bro, we have to ask the question... Is Luigi still overlooked? It's kind of hard to tell.

Three Weeks of Arcade

If you followed this blog in the past weeks, you probably noticed a constant theme among three of my first reviews: Internet games. Yes, I know I reviewed three games whose concepts could be retraced to Internet, at least in a way or another.

-Desktop Tower Defense referred to the very large number of tower defense games on Internet;
-Castle of Shikigami III is based on vertical flight shooters, also known as Bullet Hells;
-And Yard Sale: Hidden Treasures is an object search game, and we can find lots and lots of those on the Web.

I noticed that theme, and so I decided to have another theme for the next reviews. Have you ever been to an arcade? I do mean here a place where there are arcade games, such as those very, very old machines. But arcade places also usually have additional things that don't necessarily count as video games; an arcade can also have things like pinball machines, air hockey tables, Whack-A-Moles... and if the arcade is big enough, you can bet that there's also going to be a pool table. Because, let's face it, even if an arcade exists so that kids could have fun with video games that they didn't own... in the end, an arcade is there so that its visitors have fun. And that means it can have so many much more things than just, well... arcade games!

I'm gonna concentrate on those arcade bonuses in the next weeks. You see, here are the next three reviews.

-Mario Pinball Land will cover the whole pinball thing; pinball machines are still pretty fun to play. As for this game... well, I won't spoil the review for you, but... There's a reason I label it one of the worst Mario games.
-Thrillville: Off The Rails is an amusement park tycoon game most of all, but a big part of the game is spent playing seven mini-games, all of which are reminiscent of those found in amusement parks (such asWhack-A-Mole, Donkey Races, Ballon Pop...). Those games, while not all technically also available in arcades, can still be considered sort of as such, as you need to pay an amount of money to play them, and you can either win or lose.
-Last but not least, Midnight Play Pack contains five different games, two of which are bowling and pool. The latter can be found in some arcades, while the other can also be found, except in much, much bigger places.

The link is sort of weak, but it's there. And it's all that counts.

Top 12 Most Unexpected Super Smash Bros. Characters

The success behind Super Smash Bros. and its franchise lies in a simple idea: How can we get the biggest Nintendo stars in the same game and make them fight like mad? Masahiro Sakurai found the answer pretty quickly, and the rest is history. The original Super Smash Bros., for the Nintendo 64, contained 12 characters, 4 of which were unlockable. The sequel that came out for the GameCube had a roster twice the size of the original, with 25 characters. Then, when the Wii came around, the fans rejoiced at the announcement that a new bigger, better, faster, stronger SSB was coming out. The result was Super Smash Bros. Brawl, with a cast of 35 characters.

And now, the new console generation will also get its moment of Smash, with a new game coming out in a few months. This new game will be available both on Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, and it's almost sad that I won't be able to play it with my puny Wii. Three characters were announced for this new installment. First of all, MEGA MAN! This had been hoped ever since the reveal that Sonic was playable in Brawl, and finally our friend the fighting android enters the Brawl scene. Who else? The Villager from Animal Crossing (odd choice, but he seems just as cool as all the others; besides, we needed an Animal Crossing character) and.... Wii Fit Trainer. THIS is the most unexpected choice. Nobody – or almost nobody – would have predicted such a character in the next Smash installment.

However, this is not the first time that the team behind SSB makes bizarre choices of characters to add to the roster. Even back in the times of the first Smash game, there were fighters that nobody would have expected. In fact, had the hype been this great back in the times of the N64 game, everyone would have tossed around their hypothesis for the roster. And people would have been surprised more than once over the course of three games; in fact, they would have been surprised 12 times, if not more. Here are my picks for what were the most unexpected new characters in the first three games. Remember, I consider every character on this list by the game he/she showed up in first.