Retrospecticus

Having recently played through the original Super Mario Land, Super Mario Land 2 and Warioland: Super Mario Land 3, I turned my attention to the next game in the series which is Wario Land 2. From the very title it hints at a different experience, dropping the Super Mario Land moniker that it had carried prior. That was the first clue that things had taken a change of direction from the previous games. My cartridge for this was the original GameBoy cartridge, this entry had the blessing of having feet in either camp, a piece of software that could be played on two generations of hardware. Two versions of this game were officially produced, one boxed and marked up as an original GameBoy game, with a Super game Boy pack enabled palette swap and a year later a GameBoy Color (Colour) variant that carried more colours for the applicable enabled hardware. I have the original GameBoy version in cartridge form. The manual in this is glorious, great drawings, ...

I've recently fallen deeply in love with my 3DS and have subsequently been looking at the wide and varied range of Nintendo DS games. I came across the rather controversial Super Princess Peach, which I was actually first made aware of while browsing a bundle of loose carts for sale on Facebook Marketplace, where it’s beautiful Peach designed label caught my eye. I sniffed myself out a boxed complete version and set myself up to play it. It’s a 2D platformer, with the twist in that Mario & Luigi have been captured and Peach sets out to save them. There was quite a bit of hubbub around this when it was released in 2004/5, as it was potentially marketed towards girls – with Nintendo it seems getting both lauded and criticised for their approach. Other than a quick look on Wikipedia, I ignored any reviews or scores and dove in. I played on a N3DS-XL . The basis of the game is that it’s a 2D platformer, based primary in the Mario universe wit...

I’ve recently been spending bit of time looking at Wario, culminating in my desire to go back and finish some of the games I’ve never finished and games I’ve never even played. It’s also an excuse to hunt down and pick up a few glorious boxed GameBoy games, which is always gratifying fix.     The true lineage of the Wario Land games goes back to the Super Mario Land games, with the third in that series being the first Wario Land game as such. Being a big fan of the mainline mario games that were on the GameBoy I already had the first two and am very familiar with them from when they originally came out on my GameBoy, the third I honestly forget how I acquired but I’ve certainly had it for a while. I also managed to pick up a very decent Wario Land 4 a few years back at a car boot sale, which left me with only Wario Land 2 & 3 to finish the GameBoy set (I have a few of the other format titles in the series but not all) I decided to start of...