Retrospecticus

Hardly fresh off the back of - but since I played, 100%’d and put some thoughts down about Wario Land 2, I’ve done the same with the follow up game over the last five months, appropriately named - Wario Land 3. So, after the previous games adventures in retrieving your fortune from sassy Captain syrup, you are flying around when your plane suddenly crashes and you become stranded in a mysterious forest. Upon some exploration Wario is captured by a mystery figure and transported to a different world. You are tasked with collecting 5 musical instruments and upon safe return of these, you are promised to be returned to your world.     Also, remember booklets, remember the thought, art and love that went into these, check this out…….     This was a GameBoy Color game. Playing this on a GameBoy Color is the intended method obviously, although I’d suggest playing it on the GameBoy Advance, preferable on a SP so that you can actually see what...

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...