Metroid Fusion on Gameboy Advance (8/10)

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Also billed as Metroid 4, this is the follow-up to the much lauded SNES Metroid entry. I don’t think it’s quite as good as that one but it’s very similar in feeling. There are way more hidden secrets than I expected so a 100% completion is out of the question for me. The game was pretty easy going until I hit some of the later boss battles. After you defeat a boss, it morphs into a blob that keeps attacking you until you shoot 4 or 5 missiles into it. It’s so frustrating. Otherwise, it’s exactly what you expect from a 2-D Metroid game and you already know if you’ll like it.

No Retreat, No Surrender (7/10)

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Corey Yuen’s American directorial debut is one of the cheesiest pieces of garbage you could possibly watch. It sets itself up as a karate dojo vs. the mob story, but immediately becomes a teen drama after the opening scene. Our humiliated dojo instructor moves to Seattle and his son befriends a Michael Jackson impersonator. He is soon the target of the local bully and does exactly what you’d expect: conjures the ghost of Bruce Lee and trains to fight the ultimate exhibition karate fight against Jean Claude Van Damme. The only bit of competent direction is final fifteen minutes of karate matches, The rest is pure 80s cheese.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider on PC (8/10)

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It’s a Dishonored 2 stand-alone expansion pack! If you liked that game you’ll probably like this too. You play as the Billy the ship lady from and do all the usual sneaking around and save spamming that you remember from before. Most of the game centers around a single section of town with one unique zone (like a residence or bank) to explore in each chapter. I spent most of my efforts trying to complete a no-kill play through. Turns out there is no real penalty for killing until you fget to the final choice of whether to kill the “Outsider.”

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap on Gameboy Advance (9/10)

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This is probably the most underrated entry in the Zelda series. While most folks would rank A Link to the Past higher, I think it’s the best of the 2-D games. The mere fact that you can move diagonally is enough for me. In addition you have all the usual tropes of a Zelda game: you must save the princess from the evil wizard, a cutesy sidekick that guides you on your quest, lots of puzzle-based gameplay, and each dungeon gives you a new ability.

The main hook here is the ability to shrink down and explore the world from a bug’s eye view. In the end, this feature is not used to its full potential. It becomes just another limited-use dungeon solving ability rather than a way to explore the same environments in from another viewpoint. Nevertheless, the way in which you are depicted as a dot with a word bubble icon is very clever.

It may not be the most groundbreaking game in the series, but it is one of my favorites.