April Roundtable: Why Are So Many Of These Questions About Mario?

April Roundtable: Why Are So Many Of These Questions About Mario?

We’re now into our second year of a global pandemic and our brains are fried. We’re not up for the serious stuff. So let’s talk about the gaming mysteries that haunt us as we try to sleep.

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Eat Your Games: Breath of the Wild’s Hot Buttered Apples

Eat Your Games: Breath of the Wild’s Hot Buttered Apples



Can you imagine being a farmhand at a modest Hyrulian stable, when suddenly Link flies in on his paraglider, lands next to your campfire, cooks for 29 hours without sleeping and then teleports away in a puff of neon blue smoke? What about being a bandit in a fight with the hero of Hyrule himself, and just when you feel like you have him on the defensive, he stuffs 17 apples and an entire raw chicken into his face at an unnatural speed? Such is life for background characters in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. (more…)

9 Facts Only Players of the Original Game Boy Will Know

9 Facts Only Players of the Original Game Boy Will Know

As a primarily handheld gamer, it’s a bit weird to be in the console gamer circles. Handheld consoles are hardly ever discussed; they seem to fall into a cultural black hole. I regularly hear stories about how great things like Overwatch or Shadow of the Colossus or Super Mario 64 are, yet I never find the fans squealing about Radiant Historia, Bravely Default or, well, anything not named Pokemon. Retro gamers are all about the greats of the NES and SNES, but y’all, the Game Boy outsold both of them in a mere nine years (and with the Game Boy Color’s sales figures, outsold both of them combined.) The console generation gap is even weirder to me, because within my generation, everyone knew the Game Boy. Everyone wanted one or had one. Nowadays? We got the NES classic and SNES classic, but the best the Game Boy has gotten is a few rereleases on the 3DS Virtual Console. Where is the justice in this? For y’all that didn’t get the chance to experience it firsthand, sit down and let me tell you what you’ve missed.

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Hot Dads of Gaming: Ganon(dorf)

I’ve always liked big guys. Despite being a short lady (or perhaps because of it), some part of me is intrinsically drawn to tall, boorish, weirdly animal-like men. I’ve got a mental vault of inappropriate fantasies about characters like Killer Croc, Obadiah Horn, and zombie Gregor Clegane—fantasies that are probably rooted in my childhood love of Prince Adam’s barbarous visage in Beauty and the Beast, or maybe even further back, in the days of Johnny Bravo (damn, those muscles were huge!) and Dragon Tales (damn, those… scales were shiny?). (more…)

The Evolution of Princess Zelda

As the world waits with bated breath for the release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in 2017, it’s fun to reflect and reminisce on the amount of progress that Nintendo’s protagonist Link has made throughout the years of his development. What once was a 2D top-view game for the Nintendo Entertainment System has evoked some of the greatest games of Nintendo’s wheelhouse. Although reflecting on the change of Link is exciting (the internet can’t seem to handle how he will be wearing a swimsuit in Breath of the Wild) it brings to question the character development of the series titular character: Princess Zelda. The following years, and different reincarnations, can help us further understand Zelda as a character and what she means for future Legend of Zelda games. (more…)