Videogame and board game reviews by game critic Erik Twice. What does he think about the game of the year? And what about that forgotten classic? Read about it here!
It’s not well-known, but the original F-Zero had a series of small sequels over the years. Released for Nintendo’s Satellaview, a unique Super Famicom periphelial that connected the console with a radio satellite, these games were available only in Japan and only for a brief period of time.
Preserved by historians and fans, they are a great choice for those looking for a bit more classic F-Zero action from Nintendo themselves.
F-Zero never was technologically important. Published five years after Space Harrier and a year after Hard Drivin’ and its 3D graphics hit the arcade, its importance is rooted, not so much on novelty, as on bringing arcade advancements home.
It is, in fact, a fairly conservative game with more in common with old-fashioned classics such as Punch-Out that with a genre that progressed in leaps and bounds. And it is this traditionalism, not its technology, that has kept it relevant for almost thirty years.
I had very low expectations for Terraforming Mars: Prelude. So low, in fact, that I almost expected to dump the namesake cards and keep it around only for the handful extra corporations and projects included in the package. After all, what’s the point of playing an engine-building game if half the engine is already built for you? But it’s not quite like that.
It’s something much more interesting.
Beat’em ups have the reputation of being a dumb genre. The idea of punching your way through group after group of enemies, once appealing, has become synonymous with boredom and repetition. Like many, I thought the genre was lifeless and dull, a matter of punching enemies harder than they could hit you.
And yet, when I played Final Fight and took the streets of a fictionalized New York city I realized it didn’t matter how hard my character could punch. What mattered was who.
The average hospital wasn’t lucky enough to be designed from scratch. Most were forced to grow organically, absorbing new buildings as they ran out of space and new treatments were developed.
Medical centers that started out curing common diseases like Invisibility or the cheese-induced Bloaty Head could find themselves overrun by many, much more difficult patients just a few years later. The constant threat of earthquakes, epidemics or health inspections only made it worse, making it more and more difficult to fulfill a hospital’s most important goal: To turn up a big, nice profit.
