An Unqualified Game Reviewer

 It's alright.

 I’m not necessarily talking about games this week; in fact the inspiration for this pointless, poorly thought-out, badly written, childishly provoked rant was actually Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’ve recently been re-watching several episodes of TNG. In the wake of Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and all the other recent garbage with the label of “Star Trek” unjustifiably stapled onto it, Red Letter Media released two hours of Mike and Rich talking about their favourite episodes of TNG and this made me want to re-watch some of my old favourites, as well as the one that I don’t remember that well, but were apparently really good. I’ve been watching them in no particular order, but I recently got around to The Best of Both Worlds, the infamous two-parter where Captain Picard is assimilated by the sinister Borg Collective. This revelation is perhaps one of the most well-known cliffhangers in all of Star Trek: the captain has been assimilated, Riker is now in command, ...

 Playing Fortnite for the first time, I felt like David Bowman at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey , except instead of staring into the infinite wonders of the cosmos, I was staring at the infinite blight on humanity. Well, okay that’s a bit too harsh, but I still hate it, although unfortunately it’s the only thing that my idiot friends are into at the moment so I basically have no choice but to continue playing it in order to maintain what pathetic excuse for a social life I currently have, COVID-19 not-with-standing. I’ll give it some credit; as it’s the first and so far only battle-royale game I’ve ever played, I went into it with some expectations. Firstly, I was expecting a barrier to entry for someone starting so late, but no; if you’re a new player the matches you join will be full of easy bots for you to practice on while you level up, but only for about 5 or 6 ranks which you can attain within 2 or 3 matches depending on your own previous experience with online shooter...

 I haven’t played a huge amount of Metroidvania games in the past; outside of actual Metroid and actual –vania I’ve played 2, I think, maybe 3. The first one I ever played was Poacher by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame, although playing that game gave a feeling of familiarity with the exploration, back-tracking, and respawning monsters so it’s possible that I have played Metroidvania games before that and simply forgotten about them. Anyway, when it comes to the question of which is better, Castlevania or Metroid, I can’t answer that, but I can answer the similar question of which one I prefer personally. So I’m going to do just that... I’m pretty sure it was a Metroid game I played first, and that game was actually Metroid Prime and I’m not sure whether that counts given that’s it’s 3D and therefore not strictly a Metroidvania game. Then again whether it counts or not doesn’t really matter because this game is unplayable to me. Why? Because of the control scheme. Metr...

 Recently I bought myself a copy of Banjo-Kazooie for the N64. I mainly did this to try and justify my purchase of an N64, because I haven’t seen a proper return investment of experience from that console yet. For example, when I bought a second-hand GameCube a few months before, the first game I got was Metroid Prime; unfortunately I couldn’t get into that because the control scheme was fucking atrocious, but later I came across a copy of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, a much better experience that made the purchase of a GameCube totally worth it. Recently I’ve been trying to get a similar experience out of the N64. The first game I had was GoldenEye 007. I’ve been a fan of Perfect Dark (which I have of XBLA) for years and of TimeSplitters for as long as I can remember, so seeing as Perfect Dark is the spiritual successor to GoldenEye, and Free Radical, the developers of TimeSplitters, were formed of former Rare employees who worked on GoldenEye, it seemed to be the perfect f...