Nintendo blast open-world gaming’s eardrums with a double-necked Flying V

Legend of Zelda, The: Breath of the Wild (2017)

Can a man get away with crying? Especially in front of his girlfriend. Men are often being told they should feel able to open up about their emotions, but I wonder. Am I now emasculated for life? Forever to be dismissed as a blubbing wreck with no bottle? Will even the children point and laugh at me? I’ll have to buy a muscle-suit and wear it at all times just to counteract that event, maybe with three smokes in my mouth too.

It’s terrible. Who’d expect underwear cartridge bandits in this day and age?

Super Mario Bros. 2 (1989)

Burkey enthusiasts among you may be interested to note that Super Mario Advance is the one and only game I’ve ever lost. That’s not lost as in given away, in a similar vein to when you give a hoody to a girl and you’re much too unassertive and conscious of your social standing to ask for it back, I’m talking about misplacing the game and never, ever finding it. I’d love to know what I did to it, where it could be now. If only there was some sort of tracking device I could have used back in 2001 – if there was, I’d have put it on everything.

After all, what if someone had stolen it from me? And I was able to track down the guy who did it? Wouldn’t that be a plot-twist? I sometimes read about people having their entire collections stolen, or oftentimes stolen and sold on by their older brothers to buy drugs. For God’s sake, we’re talking SNES collections with Chrono Trigger and EarthBound, here. If that happened to me, I think I’d go on a rampage. I’m serious, I couldn’t be held responsible for my actions.

How to know your audience, and sell them a game they could well do without

Battletoads (TBD)

It mightn’t exactly be best practice to analyse a product before it comes out, but that doesn’t stop the legions of fans out there writing things off, way before they ever come to pass. We all knew the Ricky Gervais episode of The Simpsons would be a disaster, for example. But we couldn’t know that before we watched it, right? Actually, we could, because it really isn’t that hard to read your audience and give them something they want – and not something you think they want. And this is where I, if I happened to run some godawful consultancy firm, would propose millions of job redundancies worldwide.

Don’t be a sitting duck – tool up with the NES Zapper and get hunting

Duck Hunt (1987)

I’m gonna let you in on a secret that makes me look equal parts softy and petty: I had to block someone from my social media sites because they kept presenting photos of ducks that they’d shot on hunting trips. You already know that I all but crumbled when given a gun to shoot, so there’s no way I could turn a shooter on a nice little ducky. We once had to dissect a sheep’s heart in Biology class and I couldn’t even hack the idea of putting a knife into it. So how could I give both barrels to little Huey, Dewey or Louie?

What’s pocket-sized, bundles of fun and never out of a young man’s hands?

Pokémon Gold, Silver and Crystal (2001)

I was cleaning out my room the other day, always a thankless task that ends up getting cut short by many a distraction. You’d need a team of top archaeologists to sift through everything in my room, and even if they got past the first few layers of clothes, they’d have to resort to using proper Carbon-14 dating to detail everything else that’s buried in here.

On this occasion, I found my first ever mobile phone: a Mitsubishi Trium Geo flip phone. It’d probably still be working too, if I’d had the charger for it. Actually, I’m surprised it wasn’t still holding on to an inkling of battery. This was a phone from the days when they were designed to last through a nuclear war, if they had to. Well, let’s be fair – their large battery packs didn’t need to power highly complex operating systems, architecture and dozens of applications. Still, WAP was a pretty intense deal, right?

Saunter in, beat the pros, grab the cash and wavedash outta there

Super Smash Bros. Melee (2002)

You may not believe it, but the website is dead. That’s what all of us top tech bods are saying. Not just that, but mobile apps are dead too. The cinema is dead. Buying music, that’s dead. Pubs are dead. And as for using your voice to talk to people – that’s well into rigor mortis.

I don’t personally believe any of this, of course, but it’s sweeping statements like these that grab attention in marketing headlines, and they might just fool some gullible CEOs into dropping money on unproven new technology. Well, whatever about all that, it is my sad duty to inform you that the ever-popular GameCube game, Super Smash Bros Melee, is also dead.

Uh-oh! The gravy train have started to move!

Mega Man X6 (2002)

A lot of people, when you ask them how their day in work was, tell you that they did “nothing”. Actually, they’ll say the same thing when you ask them what they did last night or what they’re doing for their upcoming 37th birthday. But “nothing” is always something, even if that just entails sitting there, faffing about like a pudgy potato and watching Netflix. And would you believe me if I told you that I once had a job where I was paid full whack for doing absolutely nothing, besides watching whatever I wanted?

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Dear Nintendo, I’ve got some rather nicer things to say about your product…

F-Zero GX (2003)

Hate to demoralise you so early in the week, but I’m here to tell you that you might as well not bother making an effort in life. You gotta work things out ahead of time – on a sliding scale of hours spent, versus the probability that your hard work will be recognised and rewarded, where do you stand? And having worked this out, surely the best course of action is to find that sweetspot where you can get the most reward for the least amount of effort. Ever a man to put my theories into practice, and in one of my shrewder moves, I took this approach to writing my disseration in my final year of college.

Top 5 Retro Final Bosses

Top 5 Retro Final Bosses (2020)

You’ve shelled out your hard-earned cash on a brand-spanking new game, gotten through the first few levels, built up your skill and routed all the henchmen. Now all that stands between you and that satisfying, sweet release of the credits screen is the dastardly Final Boss. Yes, it’s tough to even think of any game that doesn’t boast some sort of a final foe for you to defeat – and in the case of most games, particularly in days gone by, the Final Boss was the biggest showpiece of the entire caper.

Wouldn’t you feel short-changed if you took down a load of megabosses, and fought your way to the end of a challenging run-and-gun game, only to be confronted with a teensy pushover of a last opponent? You couldn’t have ended Street Fighter 2 by fighting Dhalsim, could you? In the case of final bosses, bigger and meaner is definitely better. Here, we take a look at the Top 5 Retro Final Bosses, showing that even primitive hardware can throw up some of the most cataclysmic battles ever.