Super Mario Odyssey (Part 3)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Time to end this!

Land on the Moon

... ...I'm speechless. It's beautiful.

Mario and Cappy, with the Odyssey at full power, depart for the moon, with Cappy dressing Mario up in a white tux. The final showdown at Honeylune Ridge, Moon Kingdom. For a land up there, it’s got a lot of activity. Including a giant chapel in the distance. Low gravity, allowing Mario to make huge jumps around. The planet, giant and visible from this spot, truly magnificent. Makes one feel minuscule in the universe.

If you fall in the lava, might as well kiss that health
goodbye, you won't jump high enough to return to safe land.

There’s plenty of Power Moons to be found here as well, but it’s not exactly the focus now, is it? We have a nonconsensual wedding to crash. To get to the chapel, Mario passes by an underground cave… actually a long stretch of platforming over lava, with enemies to take over. That section felt more like a “Bowser’s Castle” area than Bowser’s actual castle! And it’s a tough part, too. I remember a portion where I had to capture a Chargin’ Chuck and run through on a tight stretch of platform. The underground ends with a rematch against Madame Broode.

Looks warm and welcoming. And yet, ominous.

Kind of incredible that for the wedding, Bowser even
bothered to get his messy red hair combed.

This leads us to the plateau, and into the Chapel where we find Bowser and Peach alongside a whole crowd of people seemingly kidnapped to attend. Even the audience is non-consenting! Bowser, you gotta learn to accept a “No”. What kind of example are you setting for Jr.? No means no! At the sight of his forever enemy, the dragon isn’t happy. A trapdoor opens and the plumber falls to an arena under the chapel. Final boss! This fight is very similar to the one in Cloud Kingdom; same gimmicks, stealing Bowser’s top hat and punching him repeatedly with it to send him flying into electrified barriers. Bowser’s pattern is a lot trickier than before, but aside from that? Yeah, pretty much the same fight. It’s kinda disappointing, really.

Movie Review: Drop

The second film I went to see in theaters this past Monday.

The story

Violet Gates (Meghann Fahy), a therapist living in Chicago, helps women who have freed themselves from toxic, abusive relationships. She does it from a place of understanding and compassion, as she has suffered in the past from such a relationship with the father of her child. But she's finally getting back into the dating scene, ready to meet someone new. She leaves her 5yo son Toby to be babysat by her younger sister Jen (Violett Beane), and she leaves for her date.

The location? The Palate, a fancy restaurant located on a high floor of a building. The date? A charming photographer by the name of Henry Campbell (Brandon Sklenar). Several more people are introduced, like Matt the waiter, Cara the bartender, Phil the sleazy in-house pianist, and some of the fellow patrons in the establishment that night. Henry is only a few minutes late.

The date begins well, but Violet receives drops on her Digi-Drop app of multiple custom memes telling her she's going to have a bad night. These get increasingly threatening, and she shows them to her date until she's contacted by a mysterious Let's_Play who tells her not to tell anybody, and especially not Henry, about what's going on.

Movie Review: A Minecraft Movie

On Easter Monday, I had time to go see two films in theaters; this one, and Drop (that review will be posted tomorrow). Funny Barbenheimer-style double feature, I'm growing to enjoy those.

Directed by Jared Hess, A Minecraft Movie had been in the plans for roughly ten years, no doubt due to the game's insane popularity. If it's huge, make a movie about it. The blocky graphics of the Mojang hit wouldn't have made for the most visually interesting thing on a silver screen, which is why the film instead went for more textured stuff in the Minecraft world... stuff that's still very blocky in design regardless, and that goes for both the cubes of items and all the animals and living/undead creatures living in it. There was a worry early on regarding the uncanny valley feel it could get, but the designs hold up relatively well after all. Anyway...

The story

When he was young, Steve (Jack Black) yearned for the mines; so when he became adult, he went down there and found two strange artefacts: A glowing cube-shaped orb, and the Crystal, a glass container for the cube with markings all over it. Putting one in the other opens a portal to the Minecraft universe's Overworld, where Steve, a creative mind bored by the real world, could live the rest of his days without a worry. ...well, aside from the threats every night. He has even made a friend, a dog-like wolf he named Dennis!

However, he hasn't only made friends in that world; he has antagonized the Piglins of the Nether, and their leader Malgosha the witch. They need the orb in order to invade the Overworld and destroy it. To ensure they cannot do so, a captured Steve sends his wolf to the real world with the orb and crystal, and it hides them in Steve's old home.

Super Mario Odyssey (Part 2)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Gonna run through several kingdoms in one go.

Lands of Themes

Put a coat on that man, he's freezing!

From the Cascade Kingdom, Mario and Cappy travel to the Sand Kingdom, the location of Tostarena, inhabited by Dia de Los Muertos-style skeleton people. And yet, the first thing the heroes do upon landing… is shiver. The desert is overtaken by ice. Well, that’s a new twist on an idea! We’ve seen plenty of video game worlds that were a mix of lava and ice, rarely one where part of the plot involves one taking over the other – and generally, it’d be the opposite, like fire burning a frozen land. Several worlds in Super Mario Odyssey play on the concept of contrast, and as a result many have two coexisting themes, which is more interesting than just having classic video game world themes to walk around in. (Not the first game to do this, but those are rare. The only other example I can think, off the top of my head, is Rayman Origins.)

2D or not 2D, that is the question!

The fancy bunny gal with the explosive temper. (Fun fact: I
added images to this article right on Easter day. So I'm only
a day late with all the bunnies!)

We investigate, going past the  town and into the ruins, where we find one Power Moon; this opens the way towards a floating island, in which we’re introduced to another concept: Collecting five Moon Shards to obtain a full Moon. That, in turn, opens the way to an inverted pyramid, with the Broodals’ ship hovering around its top. The bunnies up there boast that Bowser has stolen this land’s most prized treasure, the Binding Band, to put on Peach’s finger during their nonconsensual wedding. One of them, Hariet, comes down and fights Mario with an arsenal of explosives. Nothing we haven’t seen before. Following that, the inverted pyramid rises in the air, and Mario descends into the new chasm to fight this land’s deity, Knucklotec, protector of the ring and the true reason why the desert has frozen over.

When the occasion arises, Mario doesn't turn down a good ol'
mano a mano combat.

Super Mario Odyssey (Part 1)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3

Covering another Mario title here almost feels like an event. I’ve always been a huge fan of the Mario franchise. I didn’t get my Switch until 2023, so for six years I witnessed, from a distance, the new evolution of Mario’s adventures, now taking on a more semi-open world feel thanks to its latest outing. Of course, as soon as I got the console, Super Mario Odyssey was on the must-buy list alongside other major titles from Nintendo.

This new entry, released on October 27th, 2017, was Mario’s latest proper 3D adventure since the Galaxy duology, so it was interesting to see which direction the franchise would take this time. Well, it didn’t disappoint. There isn’t a ton I can say for an intro, I just want to jump right into it. Jump up, super star!

Land of Hats

There probably wasn't an adventure, we're still in the
Mushroom Kingdom.
(P.S. I am using ZebraGamer's playthrough for the
screenshots. Go check it out!

If there’s an adventure before this one, we don’t get to see it; all we know is that Princess Peach was captured by Bowser. Dude just can’t get the hint that she isn’t into him. This time, he’s wearing proper wedding attire; goes to show how serious he is, even as he battles Mario. A quick boomerang toss of his top hat, and Bowser sends Mario’s cap flying, then tosses his forever enemy overboard. All Princess Peach can do is watch and yell out to her hero, while her crown… jumps on her head? With eyes? A propeller shreds the red cap to bits, but it is picked up by a strange top hat ghost.

Cappy, Mario survived the literal death and rebirth of the
universe. He'll be back on his feet in no time!

When Mario comes to, he is being awoken by the same ghost, and he has landed in a world with very little color. Aside from the giant moon in the background. Do I hear a skeleton sing? The ghost flies off with the piece of cap, but Mario catches up to him. Poor little guy, he looks so sad. We learn that this is the Cap Kingdom, inhabited by his kind, the Bonneters; they just got attacked by Bowser. This little guy, Cappy, is in distress, as his sister was kidnapped by the monster; she's the crown on Peach’s head.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game - Complete Edition

Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series is one most people know of, though not everyone may know about its finer details. It’s fair to call it a franchise, too; six graphic novels originally released from 2004 to 2010, an animated short, a movie (which I reviewed), and an anime series released on Netflix (which I haven’t seen). It’s got enough of a following to get revived every couple years in some way, shape or form. Every iteration tells the story in a slightly different manner.

Alongside the movie came an associated beat’em-up video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and released to the PlayStation Network on August 10th, 2010 in North America and the next day in PAL regions, then to Xbox Live Arcade two weeks later. While the game is well-known, its claim to fame – or, should I say, to infamy – was its delisting from both digital platforms on December 30th, 2014 due to the license expiring at Universal. Thus, despite its association to a popular franchise, the beat’em-up could not be played at all, and would remain in that state for several years.

…until time came to celebrate the movie’s tenth anniversary in 2020, and efforts were made from both O’Malley and the film’s director Edgar Wright to rescue the game from purgatory, while we’re at it. Talks with Ubisoft led to interest, and so in September that year Ubisoft announced a remaster for release to several more digital platforms (Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PC, Xbox One and Stadia – lol, that last one is dead already). Even better, a deal was made with Limited Run Games, which specializes in creating and distributing physical formats of games, usually indie and/or only available digitally. The remaster, both on digital and physical formats, was released in January 2021.

I found the Nintendo Switch physical edition at a convention and practically threw my cash at the seller. I knew of this game’s tumultuous history, and I wanted to own a copy. Alongside the cartridge came a free shiny trading card, an alternate box art, an old-school SNES-style instruction booklet small enough to fit in the box, and a “concert ticket” for The Clash at Demonhead with opening act Sex Bob-Omb at Leo’s Place. Feelies, we have feelies, there’s something so nice about those.

Now that this is all out of the way, I can talk about the game!

Brawl Across Toronto

"Hey, are you a 1-Up? 'cause you give me a new life."
Note: Playthroughs I'using for screenshots can be seen
here, here and here.

Exploring the Nintendo Switch Online #1

Near the end of 2024, I started toying with the idea of getting a subscription to the Nintendo Switch Online and covering the games in there. It’s not like I don’t have a ton of games to discuss already, but this could allow me to expand a bit more. It’s also a way to give me stuff to talk about again, as I’m starting to see a potential end to regular Quick Reviews, as the games I’ve got yet to cover are getting longer and I might need to find an alternative eventually. So hey, why not these instead? That could work, right?

Every month since the start of the year, I played a few games from the list, starting from the quickest and working my way up. Many of the quickest games are so short or have so little content that I wouldn’t feel right having an article just for them; so instead, I’ll discuss them in catch-all articles! A lot of the quickest games here can be finished in under an hour. So, I’m going to start with the quickest, and record my thoughts here. Don’t expect in-depth reviews at first – just a paragraph will do. However, as I progress through that collection, I’ll do larger articles. Eventually, I will indeed turn these into Quick Reviews. But for now, the games are too short for this.

And, bonus, I have enough done to occupy a week when I don't have other reviews ready.

I've collected three months' worth of paragraphs on games, and so I decided to focus on those from a single console today: The Nintendo Entertainment System, the one that didn't quite start it all (so much more came before it), but was truly the beginning of Nintendo's meteoric rise in fame.

The Kong Games

Danger! Construction zone! (And ape, too.)

Donkey Kong: Ah, the classic! The game that featured Mario before he was Mario, rescuing his girlfriend of the time, Pauline. Only three levels, you probably know them already: The ladders and the barrels, 75M with the walking fire and the springs, and the third stage with Jumpman pulling support beams to send the eponymous ape crashing down. It’s a classic for a reason, and like many games of the NES era and prior, it feels like playing a part of History. Yeah, it’s basic, but that’s normal for games of the time. It’s not Nintendo’s first game (they released arcade cabinets, games on Color TV, and Game & Watch prior to this), but it’s the one that took them on the road to massive success.