Set the scene around 1984 at a busy bowling alley. Uninterested in the ball and pin action, a young girl begs a fist full of quarters from her father and walks with purpose past the rumble and crash of the lanes. Upon reaching the snack bar, she commandeers a bar stool and maneuvers it through a pair of glass doors into the darkness beyond. Shoving it up to a brightly painted game cabinet and seating herself, feet dangling, the girl feeds the machine some change and dedicates the next hour to knocking enemy knights mounted upon vultures from the sky and fleeing in panic from a pterodactyl.



As a little kid, I cut my gaming teeth in the arcades. I may have only played two games, Donkey Kong Jr. and Joust, but I would seek them out any time I could. Computers were still exotic things with green screens, found at the back of the school library and at my parents' office. My first interactions with them were via MS-DOS games bearing simple names like Castle Adventure and Bouncing Babies. The Atari 2600 first released the same year I was born and became my first console some time in the 80s. I probably owned around a dozen games for it before my dad broached the subject of upgrading to a new game machine and I made the fateful choice between a Sega or a Nintendo. Mario won the day. All the same, it would not be until I owned a Super Nintendo and the 16-bit wars with the Genesis erupted before I would identify as a gamer, complete with console loyalty. In those days, Sonic was the mascot of evil, even if he did have a damn good Saturday morning cartoon. The N64 came next, and also ended my stint as a Nintendo console fangirl. There was no use denying the siren call of the PlayStation thanks to the likes of Mega Man and Final Fantasy. The GameCube followed, then the PlayStation 2 which in turn bring us to present day with the Wii and PlayStation 3. Of course, in companion to these consoles I owned every iteration of the Game Boy, then the DS Lite, and now the 3DS. In other words, I've been gaming a long time.

I still own a fair number of games spanning multiple console generations. Every few years, I like to revisit the collection and clean house. Tastes change as we age and what was once loved can fail to hold up after a few years have passed. It is time to replay everything. And you, you lucky people, get to watch me go all nostalgic. To the game cave!

I know, I know, you're all playing Super Mario 3D Land. (Actually, I am too.) But Nintendo tossed out a little something-something last Thursday that was pretty interesting, and I am writing at you here today to explain it to you so maybe when you're done stomping turtles and slashing at things you might see if it's up your alley.

What exactly is Freakyforms? Is it an art tool? A platformer? A virtually endless source of Animal Crossing-esque silly quests? Another in-vain attempt at making people like AR for more than five minutes? Something else I will never be able to StreetPass throughout the godforsaken midwestern metropolis in which I live? A Colorforms trademark lawsuit in the making? Surprise! It's actually all of these (except maybe possibly the last one), and more! But not much more.

Some people like to hunt through flea markets for old video games to play on their failing NES systems. Others make weekly trips to the Goodwill and rifle through boxes of Corningware and AC/DC cassette tape singles while praying for a copy of Sewer Shark for their Sega CD. I, however, a man of vast means and limitless unenthusiasm, prefer to let the tiny hands of the wage-earners do the work for me.


Yes, in an effort to recapture the fond childhood excitement of receiving things in the mail, I occasionally subject myself to the trembling anticipation brought on by Japan's one and only Super Potato Famicom grab bag. 1,580 yen and a meager shipping fee ensures a small, human-like monkey will haphazardly fill a box with ten randomly selected Famicom cartridges (no boxes, no manuals, no doubles, no guarantees except that they work), which will be painstakingly hauled across this nation's highways and delivered to my door by a subservient member of the Kuroneko delivery service, at which point I can extract every last bit of value from these useless hunks of polymer. Got a hankerin' for pictures of chemical meat? Wanna take a peek into the glorious history of the Japanese NES? Read on, sweet word sponges!

The news has been very slow to get out that I am pretty much retired from gaming writing these days. Perhaps it should come as no surprise then that I received a lovely care package from Namco Bandai's PR agency a handful of weeks ago containing Go Vacation for the Wii as well as an assortment of themed press gifts inside: golf balls, a beach ball, and other vacation-themed stuff.

So I put it in, handed controllers around to the family, and gave it a spin. I'll say it right now—I am not a fan of this game. I hate excessive, slow travel (which this game's much-vaunted "open world" has in spades), and the minigames themselves, while some work out alright, are nothing that could be mistaken for Wii Sports. But my nine-year-old daughter has been magnetized to it. So I told her hey, you review it. And so, being no stranger to the N-Sider review circuit, she did...

A year ago now, the newest entry in the Metroid series, Other M, was in the process of becoming infamous for a few reasons: its departure from traditional series play mechanics, its heavy focus on story, and the direction Samus' character development was taken. As such, Other M has already been written about quite heavily. I've written critiques for every core game in the Metroid series and when Other M came out I was also ready to tear into it. Real life circumstances delayed my own writing, however, and this had some positive benefits. As time passed, my own opinions changed and matured. I hope that, writing now, my views will be much less reactionary than they would have been a year ago. Other M is a game I consider extremely important as an object of reflection. Where it went wrong and why are more valuable to the continual maturing of the video game industry than where it succeeded.



Prior to tackling this article, I had an in-depth discussion with Xantar, an acquaintance of mine and blogger at PVG. This discussion helped me solidify my stance regarding Other M and I'll be addressing quotes from it in this piece.

Some time last week, I cleared the final fight on Atsumete! Kirby, known to less crazy people—those content to wait a month and change for the English localization— as Kirby Mass Attack. You may remember this game and my declaration of adoration if you followed our E3 coverage this year. I've personally been intensely curious about it since our first look at it, a tiny clip of inexplicable DS gameplay featuring drawn lines and a metric buttload of Kirbies.

So impatient was I to get my hands on this, my most-anticipated game this year, that I politely asked the venerable Brandon Daiker if he would be so kind as to snatch the Japanese version, which released in early August, off a shelf over there and send it across the Pacific to me. Come to think of it, I still haven't paid him. [You will pay me in ways you cannot imagine--ed.]

Atsumete! Kirby brings HAL Laboratory's other great DS triumph, Kirby Canvas Curse, immediately to mind, not only because it is also controlled with the stylus, but more importantly because it is a game that explores what the almost-seven-year-old DS platform is good at, creating something that cannot be done anywhere else—and folds it into a stunningly complete package that puts to shame the often pedestrian and uninspired efforts the games market is currently inundated with.