The Mega Man Bachelors (Part 7)

The following Robo-Bachelors may have a bit of an unfair advantage over the 48 we’ve looked at in previous installments: they’re all backed by new and improved Super Nintendo power. What, that doesn’t mean anything to you? You don’t judge everything by looks alone? Oh, right.

Well, if you’re happy to give everyone a level playing field, then so am I. In which case, we look at the Robot Masters from Mega Man 7, see if we can’t find you a proper man. Though, given you’ve rejected 48 up to this point, I can admit it to you - like Capcom themselves, I am starting to run out of inspiration here.

Freeze Man (DWN-049)

This isn't to call you out specifically, but when we guys hear you girls say things like, "ugh, I hate him, he's so cocky", we panic. We panic because when we hear that, we know that you're gonna be playing tonsil-hockey with him no more than 10 minutes later, and we'll inadvertently find out about it in some cruel way. Freeze Man is that cocky guy, the type of guy we men wish we could be whenever we're down on our dating luck and are told to 'just be confident'. We'll go out, put ourselves out there and try to be as cocky and arrogant as we like, but we never truly believe it, and we just end up looking ridiculous next to Freeze Man - especially when he throws out a few taunting gestures, as he loves to do. What else could a guy called Freeze Man be, other than impossibly cool? Cool as the other side of the pillow, in fact. Go on, go out with Freeze Man if you want. It’s OK. I’ll get over it. You guys have my reluctant blessing.

Verdict: PASS

Junk Man (DWN-050)

If he’d been called Meat & Two Veg Man, I could have maybe spared this guy’s blushes, and insinuated that he was so named based on what he’s packing down there. But no, Junk Man is quite literally a trash-swimming robot. Just how bad is he gonna smell? And his special weapon just summons more garbage to envelop you in a shield… my God. It’s a pity, because he’s a pretty big guy, with an excellent jawline. There could be something of Buzz Lightyear in him. But Junk Man hasn’t looked after his gifts, and as a result his whole body is cobbled together from whatever rubbish he could salvage. I imagine, for income, he just buys loads of tat and tries to sell it on to other hoarders. This means he’ll have your house full of junk as well, and you simply can’t be having that.

Verdict: REJECT

Burst Man (DWN-051)

It took me a while to really figure out what Burst Man was all about. As far as I can gather, he's a kind of bubblebath guy who bursts off big bubbles, with explosive results. As such, the closest real-life comparison I can draw is that he's essentially a walking bath-bomb. And while I know precious few facts about women, I do know that you all go gaga for bath-bombs. To go out with Burst Man, you do have to be ready for a bit of chaos and disorder - he simply loves to set off bombs, which means there's going to be a whole load of water spilled all over your bathroom floor whenever you bathe together. If you're able to laugh that off, you'll have a fruitful, effervescent relationship with Burst Man, who'll fill you with so much joy that - yes - you'll be fit to burst.

Verdict: PASS

Cloud Man (DWN-052)

As it happens, I’m a bit of a cloud man myself. This is, I’ve worked in cloud computing before. No, I didn’t get in at the ground floor and make millions. No, I don’t know what a subnet is. No, this piece isn’t about me vying for your affections. It’s about Cloud Man, who really does have the power to make it rain. Or, more typically, he throws out bolts of lightning like it’s nothing. Now it’s difficult to generalise and say that any one specific thing is true of all women. But in my experience, you all love a bit of low, rumbly thunder, especially on a rainy, lazy day. Cloud Man can make this happen on command, and he looks like a big fluffy fella to cuddle with as well. And in the end, it always comes down to the quality of the cuddles.

Verdict: PASS

Spring Man (DWN-053)

Perhaps you’re the type of woman who is into unavailable men, but you’d probably want to wise up if Spring Man comes calling - any attempt you make to get close to him will just see you getting bounced away, as he jumps off somewhere else. Presumably you want a man who’s upright, sturdy and dependable. Not somebody who’s shaky, flaky and wobbly. You and Spring Man won’t be able to go for walks together, he’ll be bouncing and jumping all around the place. And you’d better forget about wearing high-heels - not unless they’re high-impact heels. He’ll take your hand, bound and leap into the sky like a coiled spring, and you’ll come down and land like a sack of potatoes. You wouldn’t just be blindly attracted to a very tall, unavailable man who plays by his own rules, would you? Ah, on second thought, please don’t answer that. I don’t think my spirit could take it.

Verdict: REJECT

Slash Man (DWN-054)

Here’s a man of the wilds, well-accustomed to the great outdoors. Feral, almost. You could perhaps entertain the idea of a Tarzan and Jane situation with Slash Man; you could civilise him, teach him some speech and table manners, and in return he’ll keep you safe from any interlopers, especially if doomsday arrives and we all revert to the wild. There’ll be no better man for building a shelter, foraging for supplies, setting traps, tussling with wild animals, and generally being the most practical and resourceful of all Robot Masters until Crocodile Dundee Man arrives. But don’t think Slash Man only works in the post-apocalyptic or wildlands scenario - he’d be manly and rugged in all instances, all walks of life. Slash Man is the type of guy who comes home, takes off his robo-shirt and drinks a pint of milk, or oil if it’s a Friday evening, and lets some of it drip down onto his bare chest. And no woman, no matter how comfortable or pampered or prim they may be, can resist that sight. Everyone likes a bit of rough every now and again.

Verdict: PASS

Shade Man (DWN-055)

I’m awfully glad I was just a bit too old for the whole Twilight craze, though it seems to be a universal truth that, for at least some part of their lives, girls will be into vampires. Speaking for myself, I’m more into the idea of having my blood, spirit and soul sucked out of me by some raven-haired succubus from beyond this realm. But the concept remains the same, really - by definition, supernatural, out-of-this-dimension sex would have to be better than normal, humdrum, down-to-earth sex. This is why a Robot Master like Shade Man always has appeal. He’s a master in more ways than one, let’s just say. And when he invites you to his castle, all charming and gentlemanly, you’re already tingling because you know that this is all just preamble, foreplay, before he breathes on your pale neck, kisses it, then slowly and firmly sinks his teeth in. You’re biting your lip as he’s biting your erogenous zone. You could almost buckle and fall to your knees in front of Shade Man, as you recognise the incredibly arousing fact that you now belong to him. It ought to go without saying that this is Mega Man 7’s Hottest Bachelor. And thanks to Shade Man’s eternal youth, he’ll probably retain that title for the next thousand years.

Verdict: PASS - HOTTEST BACHELOR!

Turbo Man (DWN-056)

Now we’re talking. It took me a long time to finally concede that, actually, not all of you ladies like being driven around at 150MPH and being subjected to breath-taking handbrake turns. I didn’t want to admit this, because it removes a significant string from my own bow. Without handbrakers, I don’t have much to offer. But here’s one thing I hope we can both agree on; the allure of a super-charged, fast sportscar is very difficult to resist. In Turbo Man, you’re getting a high-octane man and a muscular car, all in one. He’ll take you wherever you wanna go, in style. The only possible downside I can see is that he may cost you a fortune to run. But that’s all worth it for the fastest Robot Master alive. This guy leaves Quick Man in his dust. If not for Shade Man owning a castle, this guy might have taken the Hottest Bachelor title for Mega Man 7. Either way, the game overall offers one hell of a competitive field.

Verdict: PASS

To Be Continued!

The Mega Man Bachelors (Part 6)

The sixth installment of the now-legendary Mega Man series, and by extension the sixth installment of this now-legendary series of the Mega Man bachelors, truly brings us all around the world. We’ll be going from the American Old West, to the Middle East, to Japan, and everywhere in-between.

This is good and exciting, because you may just be sick of the punks and lowlifes and shoddy excuses for men in your hometown. If that’s the case, then it’s certainly time for you to cast your net further afield, see if you can’t bag yourself an exotic Robo-Bachelor from somewhere unexpected around the world.

Blizzard Man (MRN-041)

At first glance, Blizzard Man mightn’t seem a very prudent choice for a partner. After all, it’s nice to have some warmth to cling onto at night, and a skier like Blizzard Man don’t got none of that. But you see, it’s a mistake to think that skiing is actually about the skiing. All skiing’s about is avoiding injury for long enough until the sun goes down, and you can get to the ski lodge, all slim and tanned and warmly wrapped up, ready to cop off with someone, as the fire roars and the drink flows. Blizzard Man here is no novice to the pistes, he’s been around a while and he knows what apres-ski is all about. He goes down the Triple Black ski slopes with ease, and nobody would dare question him. If you like wearing gloves and woolly hats, you look good in turtleneck jumpers, and you want to be part of a powder-skiing power-couple, then go with Blizzard Man.

Verdict: PASS

Centaur Man (MRN-042)

If a Robot Master is half-man, half-robot, and a centaur is half-man, half-horse, then Centaur Man must be about 75% man, by my mathematics. You may generally be sick of men by now, so perhaps three-quarters of a man is more of a positive for you? Or, to be more blunt, most women have some need of a man who’s hung like a horse, at some point in their lives. But then, I was always told that size doesn’t matter, and that’s a delusion I’m happy to persist under. More to the point, if you know your mythology, you might be aware that centaurs, particularly when they get together in packs, are known to initiate a spot of gang-raping on women to keep them in line. I’m certain this is what happened to Professor Umbridge that time. Centaurs are known for being uncivilised, after all. I’m afraid I can’t, in good conscience, set you up with Centaur Man. He’s a bit too extreme for anyone’s tastes.

Verdict: REJECT

Flame Man (MRN-043)

If you're sick of the local men in your area, why not go for something more exotic and head towards the Middle East instead? For some women, and in fairness quite a lot of men as well, going out and starting a new life in the likes of Dubai and Abu Dhabi seems to represent the be-all and end-all in life. And if you can be coaxed out there by someone extremely wealthy from oil money, so much the better. Flame Man here comes straight from the oil-fields, and apparently has a purpose in using his flame stores to generate thermal energy from the oil. Seems to me like that would cause a hellacious field of fire to appear and consume everything. But until the horrid day comes, come out to live in Flame Man's palace and live yourself the high life.

Verdict: PASS

Knight Man (MRN-044)

Sometimes, when you've been let-down and dumped and left broken-hearted by men, you just want someone gentlemanly to come into your life, to show you that not all men want to hurt you. They don't come more honourable and chivalrous than Knight Man, who lives his robot-life according to the knight's code, which includes being polite and mannerly to ladies at all times. Better than that, he lives in a grand castle that he'd love to show you around. It's filled with all sorts of medieval traps, of course, but you kind of have to expect that - any Robot Master who brings you to his home is going to be subjecting you to all kinds of fatal hazards. Knight Man is dependable, trustworthy, kind and respectful. And even if it doesn't work out between the two of you, he will be accepting and understanding. If nothing else, that makes Knight Man worthy of checking out.

Verdict: PASS

Plant Man (MRN-045)

He's a nice guy and all that, looks after the plants and all the other botanicals. But I'm not so sure you need Plant Man in your life. Hope this doesn't come across as too sexist, but when a man and a woman live together, there is a natural division of labour. Men take care of the bins, women do the vacuum cleaning. These days, either of them could do the cooking, or both. But looking after the houseplants is strictly the lady's remit. There's a certain bit of truth behind the thinking of girls who keeps plants around the home - they already take care of dozens of useless articles, which means they'll have no problem taking care of one more useless article, i.e guys like me. But Plant Man would insist on taking care of all the plants, which represents a clear overstepping of his mark, a breaching of boundaries. Simply not acceptable. Not only that, I reckon he'd take to growing all sorts of wild orchids and poison ivies in your house, and just what will that do to your cats and dogs if they nibble on them?! I think you'll need to leave this guy out in the wild, where he does most of his good.

Verdict: REJECT

Tomahawk Man (MRN-046)

Mega Man 6 plays host to Robot Master designs from around the world, but much of this comes laden with sensibilities from the 1990s. As such, I do a little bit of digging around online to make sure that there are no massive design controversies dogging any of these guys. I suppose they still re-release Mega Man 6 on modern consoles, meaning we should be safe here - though I suspect the case might be a bit different if Tomahawk Man had been called Redskin Man instead. All that being said, I still wouldn't think Tomahawk Man is a very good choice for a partner, no matter what his name is. In the first place, he was built strictly to be a fighting, war robot. Not someone you'll be sharing many quiet nights in with, then. Also, he makes his home in the old American west, and I know that if there's one thing that turns women off in a hurry, it's western movies that go on for 7 hours. Like a helicopter or a submarine, Tomahawk Man's got a droolingly cool design, but only boys will fully appreciate that.

Verdict: REJECT

Wind Man (MRN-047)

I hardly think you're looking for a man who spends all day creating wind. Before you know it, you'll have regressed into that terribly sedentary lifestyle, as you both watch the television for hours on end every night, eating bad food and farting on each other every few minutes. He does have some cool facets to his design - having large wind-turbines on each shoulder means he can keep you plenty cool, although that'll probably just ruin your hair instead. In a pinch, I guess you could use him as a mode of transport. But then, just when it looks like Wind Man could be clawing back some points, he goes and ruins it all by saying, and I'm quoting him directly here: "I know Kung Fu." Whenever you start hearing some out-of-shape loser claim that they know martial arts, you might as well just walk away. Next they'll be telling you about all the arguments they've won over the internet.

Verdict: REJECT

Yamato Man (MRN-048)

Well, for a start, none of us really knew what Yamato meant when we played Mega Man 6. It turns out that the word roughly translates to the ‘spirit of Japan’. You know what that means, don't you? Well, it could mean a million things really, Japan's got a cultural footprint bigger than almost any other country, a footprint even bigger than the ones Godzilla leaves behind. But, if you're a Japanophile like my missus, then it means cherry blossoms, kimonos, mochi cake and ramen - all big, big hits. Yamato Man does call to mind a samurai warrior moreso, which means that you better not beat him at Monopoly too often, or he might commit seppuku out of shame. But these slight cultural differences aside, Yamato Man is the slice of Japan you've been waiting for in your life. And everyone must visit that country at least once before they die. He just about beats Knight Man for the title of Mega Man 6’s Hottest Bachelor.

Verdict: PASS - HOTTEST BACHELOR!

To Be Continued!

The Mega Man Bachelors (Part 5)

Mega Man 5, huh? In the old days, you could have 5 installments of a series on one game console. Now, you’re lucky if you get one installment every five years, and not a hope you’ll get two on the same console. Capcom were churning out the Mega Man games on a yearly basis, even more frequently than that at times.

But I don’t know, maybe that’s not particularly frequent. Maybe you’re a person who has gone through other halves at a rate of more than one per year. No judging here, it’s great - because I’ve got eight more Robo-bachelors here for you to feel out. This whole set of men might last you six months, if you’re lucky.

Gravity Man (DWN-033)

I’m trying to avoid gender-based generalisations, but a simple fact is that many women are attracted to power. And there are very few forces in the world more powerful than gravity. As such, Gravity Man here can reverse gravitational forces anytime he wishes, and send everyone tumbling upside-down in a quite hilarious jape. If that’s too bold for you, then Gravity Man can make life easier for you in a variety of ways: he can lower gravity at any time, in case you ever want to float anywhere. If you’re a bit bloated, or you just want to feel slimmer, Gravity Man can quite literally reduce your mass. The only trade-off, I suppose, is that his talking points may be a bit limited - he seems to only want to discuss physics and not much else. Still, in a game that’s struggling to break the mould in terms of bachelors, all of Gravity Man’s other attributes are enough to make him a viable candidate for you to ‘gravitate’ towards.

Verdict: PASS

Wave Man (DWN-034)

I like Wave Man, he’s got something of Poseidon in him. And nearly any woman in the world would want to be with a Greek God, if you’re being truly honest. You won’t just be confined to water if you embark on a life with Wave Man either - he’s perfectly ambulant on land, meaning you won’t have to be like the Little-Mermaid-in-Reverse if you want to go and see him. He does have a habit of firing harpoons from his Arm Cannon, which would lead me to assume that he’s partial to a bit of whaling - you’ll want to curtail this nasty habit of his, I’m sure. But he might also land you some lovely big fishies to eat, if you’re into seafood. Even if you’re not a pescatarian, his domain invites you to partake in a spot of jet-skiing as well, which is always fun. Wave Man’s got plus points all over the board - don’t we all want our partners to make waves with us?

Verdict: PASS

Stone Man (DWN-035)

If you're the type of gal who generally prefers someone with depth, someone a bit brooding, often with interesting things to say, then Stone Man isn't your man. He does fulfil a certain need, though; he is an exceedingly simple man, who just so happens to be built… well, like a brick shithouse, as the saying goes. Nobody would ever mess with Stone Man in public, which means you're spared any aggravation as well. I just don't know if Stone Man is ideal for a longer term relationship, however. He'll be sat there, completely silent almost all the time, speaking only when spoken to. You'll ask him, with a smile, what he's thinking about in that big old brain of his, and his answer, invariably, will be "nothing." And he's not hiding anything from you - he really will be thinking about nothing. Stone Man is essentially Puddy from Seinfeld, meaning he may only be suited to relationships that are constantly on-off. Therefore, I'll have to ask you to use your own discretion here.

Verdict: JURY’S OUT

Gyro Man (DWN-036)

I don’t know what a gyro is, and at this stage of my life I’m too afraid to ask. I suspect it’s nothing to do with gyros, that Greek delicacy of pitta bread with tzatziki and a meat of your choice. It might be one of the nicest snacks in the world, and if you can get a man to make you some, I’d say you’ve automatically got a keeper. Sadly, I think Gyro Man, looking at his design, is more like a robo-helicopter, meaning he suffers from the same problem as Mega Man 4’s Dive Man did: impossibly badass to those men out there with the dispositions of a 12-year-old boy, which is to say, the majority of men. But I I fear that Gyro Man’s effect would be lost somewhat on most women. Still, if you like a taste of the high life, you can’t do much better than having your own helicopter. At least, not until Private Jet Man comes along.

Verdict: JURY’S OUT

Star Man (DWN-037)

Some people just have that star quality, and Star Man is one of them. I’m not saying he’s an A-List, Hollywood Walk of Fame kind of star - he’s no Guts Man, that’s for sure. But bagging a guy like Star Man introduces you to a higher walk of life, an immediate upturn in your fortunes. I can picture your date with him now - firstly, he shows up in a cool spaceship that’s eco-friendly and quiet. And has plenty of cupholders. He whisks you to the opera, which he’s very into - and I’m quoting from game lore and canon here. After that, he’ll take you for a walk along the beach, both of you gently listening to the water waves crash along the coast, beneath the shimmering stars above. Star Man will be able to point out every single constellation up there, and give you all of their names. He won’t be bullshitting you about them either, like the rest of us men do. Forget you, I think I’ve fallen for Star Man myself, if you’d kindly like to step aside. It’s with no hesitation that I deem Star Man to be the Hottest Bachelor of Mega Man 5.

Verdict: PASS - HOTTEST BACHELOR!

Charge Man (DWN-038)

Strangely enough, I’m very familiar with the world of trains. It’s not like I get down to the train platform with my binoculars and indulge in some trainspotting when the 12:47 train to London comes past, nothing like that. No, my expertise is more focused on model trains, and I can tell you that this hobby attracts precisely zero females. I hardly think it attracts too many neurotypical males, either. More to the point, it’s a bloody expensive hobby. So, if all of that applies to Charge Man, then you’re talking about a slightly autistic bloke who costs a fortune to run, and if he has any mates to introduce you to, they’ll all be anoraks as well. He’s probably a perfectly nice guy, but I reckon you should leave Nigel Man here well alone.

Verdict: REJECT

Napalm Man (DWN-039)

Oh, for God’s sake. Do you know how difficult it is to even write the word “napalm” without making all sorts of tasteless references to the Vietnam War? I already talked about all that in my review of Mega Man 5 (watch this space). And now, here he is, Napalm Man himself, the source of all the trouble. Look, it’s not as if he’s the only violently explosive Robot Master out there - I even came close to giving old Bomb Man a pass, way back when. But, and I’m sorry I have to say this, but one bad date or fiery argument with Napalm Man and you could very well end up like Phun Thi Kim Phuc, the napalm girl, running down the street with her clothes completely burned off her back. I’m sure you know the photo I’m talking about. To say the least, you don’t want to run even the slightest risk of a fate like that. Napalm Man may be the least eligible bachelor in the Mega Man series period, and that is saying something.

Verdict: REJECT

Crystal Man (DWN-040)

They may all literally have the word ‘Man’ in their names, but not every prospective Robot Master date of yours has to be ultra-muscular. Case in point, Crystal Man here. He’s definitely more of the sensitive and spiritual type. Sensitive, because I don’t think his glass joints will stand up very strongly against an assailant’s punch if ever he had to defend you in public. Bad if you’re looking for someone to throw hands on your behalf, but good if you want someone who can maturely resolve conflict. And I reckon he’s spiritual because, with no less than six crystal balls making up his body, there’s no better man for divining the future. To witchy women out there who are all about spirit mediums and fortune tellers, Crystal Man heavily appeals. Just make sure he’s not feeding you baloney.

Verdict: PASS

To Be Continued!

The Mega Man Bachelors (Part 4)

The story of Mega Man 4, if you really wnated to know, is that instead of blowing up 8 Robot Masters and going after the evil Dr. Wily, you blow up 8 Robot Masters and go after the evil Dr. Cossack instead (he’s Russian). Except he’s not evil after all, just being blackmailed, or something. I think they call that kind of thing “catfishing”.

I do hope you won’t feel catfished or otherwise led on and deceived by the following 8 Robot Masters from Mega Man 4. You’ll surely find an eligible bachelor in here, maybe even 2. I’ll be honest though, a lot of these candidates are nothing better than rusty buckets of undateable bolts.

Bright Man (DWN-025)

Looking for someone to light up your life? Look no further than Bright Man. I do hope you live in a nicer, more forgiving type of area, though. Otherwise, people are gonna be shouting “bulbhead” at him. Certainly I’d avoid taking public transport with him, if possible. Slightly unfortunate looking then, but don’t let that put you off completely. Bright Man is the ideal companion if you’re a bit afraid of the dark. He’s always coming up with bright ideas, lightbulb moments as they’re called. And he’s an eco-friendly kind of guy as well, which always scores points. He’d have to be, because those old-timey lightbulbs used to blow up every five seconds. At least, they did in my old house. And Bright Man’s a nice chap who doesn’t deserve to suffer from Exploding Head Syndrome all the time.

Verdict: PASS

Toad Man (DWN-026)

Ooh, no, absolutely not. Look, these days I say that getting old is a privilege. Not everyone gets to experience it. This helps me cope with my unstoppable aging. But an unfortunate fact of life is that your looks do fade, and for a certain unlucky subset of men and women, this seems to have the effect of making them increasingly resemble a toad as they get older. And I'm afraid there's nothing appealing about being toadlike. Remember, t’was a frog that got kissed in the fairy tale, not a disgusting slimy toad. And to add many injuries to that insult, Toad Man has got to be one of the weakest Robot Masters in all of Mega Man, meaning he can't even stand up for you in a fight. And if he tells you he can make it rain, don't listen to him - he can, but he means literal rain. Just what you need, right? A weak toady man who can't go 5 seconds without ruining your hair? You can do a lot better than this.

Verdict REJECT

Drill Man (DWN-027)

Look, there’s more to a relationship than the physical intimacy. I fully believe that. But there must be physical attraction and desire, such that you’ll eventually want to get down and dirty with your man. Just by taking a look at Drill Man, though, you can see he’s not much for foreplay. You wouldn’t want either of his hands, or indeed his head, between your legs, that much is certain. Maybe you could overlook that, if Drill Man was a sweet and sensitive guy who made you feel loved and was good at romance. But guess what? He’s none of those things. He’s an angry driller who’ll make massive holes in your furniture, and make an almighty racket of noise while doing so. Keep this dangerous pest away from every one of your private areas.

Verdict: REJECT

Pharaoh Man (DWN-028)

Finally we're getting to the more affluent robot matters. Some of the previous lads we've looked at, they didn't have the proverbial pot to pee into, or leak oil into I suppose. But Pharaoh Man here is a king among men, quite literally. He'll want a cat in the house as well, which will appeal to a lot of you. Just be sure to do your own bit of sleuthing about this guy’s wealth; I've been to Egypt and a lot of the folk were hella poor. I suspect the glory days of the pharaohs are long gone. They took their wealth with them to the afterlife, didn’t they? If he's bona fide, though, then in Pharaoh Man you'll be getting a rich ruler, a kingdom and an empire to join as his Cleopatra. If nothing else, since he's a rough and ready kind of guy, I imagine he'll leave you walking like an Egyptian after a romantic evening together.

Verdict: PASS

Ring Man (DWN-029)

Ah, now we're not wasting any time. Every woman wants their happy ending, I know you do. But how many women out there remain unfulfilled and never get their ring? It's a tragic occurrence, but some men really are that dense and unaware of what they have. No such issues with Ring Man here, who'll waste no time proposing to you, and otherwise keeping you in the finest, most luxurious rings and rocks around. To Ring Man, the sanctity of marriage and the wedding vows actually mean a great deal. I know you may not be looking to fully settle down just yet, and there's nothing wrong with getting some field-playing out of your system. But when it comes time to pick a Robot Master to spend the rest of your life with, you can be sure that Ring Man measures up. He ranks as Mega Man 4’s Hottest Bachelor.

Verdict: PASS - HOTTEST BACHELOR!

Dust Man (DWN-030)

It’ll be its own miracle if I’ve managed to get four parts deep into the Mega Man Bachelors without making a calamitously sexist statement. In so saying, I’ll throw caution fully to the wind and say that it seems, perhaps, that the majority of women love dusting and hoovering. Possibly. Allegedly. Was that OK to say? Well, if this as-yet-unfounded statement were found to be true, then I can find no practical reason for keeping Dust Man around. Oh, sure, anyone would like a bit of help around the house. But you’ll probably want your man doing the grimier, nastier jobs instead. You’ve got your own pride-and-joy vacuum cleaner already, so what do you want one built into your man’s head for? It’s not him who’ll be doing the sucking in this relationship anyway. Was that OK to say as well?

Verdict: REJECT

Dive Man (DWN-031)

Dive Man’s looking for a maritime gal, rather than a good-time gal. He’s kind of a submarine-on-legs, which probably doesn’t sound too appealing to you. And that is insane, if you ask me - men just love machinery in a way that most women do not. My wife can only roll her eyes when I stop and stare at a passing helicopter. I nearly fainted when a fighter jet once roared overhead above us, but again, nothing but a mildly bemused reaction from her. Meeting Dive Man in real life would probably send me right over the edge. It would be like seeing The Hunt for Red October for the first time, all over again. You can probably take all this to mean that Dive Man is more for the boys than the girls, which is probably true. One unexpected niche of this, however, is that if you’re the single mother of a young boy, then there’s surely no finer prospective step-dad out there than Dive Man. In all other scenarios though, it’s probably best you leave him alone. Solitary women don’t tend to fare well on extended submarine stints anyway.

Verdict: JURY’S OUT

Skull Man (DWN-032)

What is it with the themes of death among Mega Man 4’s robot masters? Pharaoh Man, and now this guy. Skull Man might be appealing to your little brother, who'll find him infinitely cool. But from your perspective, all I'm seeing is a scrawny, weedy Man, all skin and bones. All bones, actually, if we want to get into it. It's possibly an eating disorder, though I find it far more likely that Skull Man is a bit of a nihilist who overindulges in all sorts of wild drugs. The severely gaunt expression could be from heroin, and to a very specific class of spoiled girl, probably from London, who gets all of her parents’ money but none of their monitoring, the heroin-chic life seems to appeal. However, in Skull Man’s case I'm thinking meth - you can always spot a meth-head. And you may be willing to dabble in that stuff a bit, though I suspect you've got enough common sense to give this death-seeking madman a wide berth.

Verdict: REJECT

To Be Continued!

The Mega Man Bachelors (Part 3)

We’ve already spun through the eligible Mega Man bachelors from the first two Mega Man games. 16 of them in total to date, all of which we have had to accept or dismiss, on many different individual merits. Has dating app fatigue set in for you yet? This isn’t like buying clothes online, you know - don’t think you can just swipe through all of these guys in half a second. You could be missing out on your robo-hubby. Could the below Robot Masters, all from Mega Man 3, win your affection?

Needle Man (DWN-017)

Well, this is where I have to make a judgment call. See, Needle Man sounds like a nice way to refer to a conked-out heroin junkie on the street, if noticed by your young child: “this way, sweetie, and mind you don’t walk on the Needle Man.” Or perhaps this Needle Man is a much more homely and wholesome guy, someone who’ll help you out with your cutesy little knitting and crocheting projects? Those little 8-bit pixel sprites can be awfully ambiguous, I’m afraid. He does look like a pretty angry guy. And pointy, too. But I can’t help but shake the idea that Needle Man is about as threatening as a little woodpecker, or a tiny hedgehog. Far from making a judgment call, I’m gonna keep my butt firmly on the fence on Needle Man, which will hopefully add a layer of mystique and romance if you do decide to date him.

Verdict: JURY’S OUT

Magnet Man (DWN-018)

Magnets and love do seem to share a relationship, at least linguistically. Animal magnetism, opposites attract, all that jazz. I think this idea of polarity works against Magnet Man’s favour, though. On one hand, he could find you completely repulsive, which is a truly horrible word to be called, but is at least scientifically correct - no matter what he does, he’ll never have the power to get truly close to you. He’ll always be just that little bit distant. Or, the opposite may apply and he could be intensely attracted to you. Which sounds great, but think about it - he’ll be all over you, stuck to you indeed, and he’ll never let you go, or even let you out of his sight. It makes Magnet Man a stage 5 clinger, and you probably don’t need that level of neediness in your life. It’s always a tough prospect, rejecting a man based on something he can’t really help. But you can’t go around feeling sorry for the guy either.

Verdict: REJECT

Gemini Man (DWN-019)

Boy, it’s the first, and to this day only Robot Master based on the zodiac. To a very certain subsection of slightly witchy women out there, one’s star-sign is paramount when it comes to dating compatibility. At least, this was true in the 90s, but how up to date do you expect my dating knowledge to be? Anyway, a bit of feminine research is never beneath me. Hence I consulted Elle magazine for guidance, no finer organ for horoscopes out there. And I’m very reliably informed that “Geminis can switch from a gentle breeze to a sexual hurricane, and sweep you off your feet.” Wow! In truth, the BS got a little too much for me at that point, but what I’ve learned is that if you’re a Libra or a Leo, Gemini Man will be the object of all your passionate, earthly desires. Capricorn and Aquarius ladies match with Gemini Man well, whereas Tauruses like me lose out. Overall, most star-signs can find compatibility with Gemini Man. And hey, even if he looks good but irritates the hell out of you, he’s got a twin brother for you to, ah, fall back on.

Verdict: PASS

Hard Man (DWN-020)

Christ, just when you thought we’d gotten past puerile wordplays with the likes of Wood Man, along comes Hard Man to blow us out of the water, with a name that’d even make your granny blush and titter. Well, if I can ask you to listen and be mature for five minutes, I’ll be able to tell you that, where I’m from, being hard means you’re tough as nails, not one to go down easily in a fight. This is certainly true of Hard Man - he’s wearing all his mother’s pots and pans, the corrugated iron stuff, so good luck striking his weak spot. For security, you want a Hard Man in your life - just make sure he’s not so hard that he has a screw loose, and a propensity to beat women up. And look, let’s face it, around my way, hard also means the same thing it does everywhere else. But that’s good, at least you’ll know that Hard Man never runs into any problems down there.

Verdict: PASS

Top Man (DWN-021)

Oh golly, oh crikey. You know I’m trying to swerve the innuendos here, and not make things too salacious. This is a family website, see. But Top Man here, well, those with a bit of insider knowledge of “the scene” know exactly where this man stands, or rather lies, in terms of bedroom positioning. Let’s put it this way, there hasn’t been a Bottom Man in the Mega Man series as yet, but when they do invent him, he’ll be dominated at once by Top Man. And look, I know I’m on the right track here. What, you think Top Man is some innocent little robo-personification of a kid’s spinning top? Come off it. Even his special weapon, isn’t a weapon at all - it’s an erotic dance. Play Mega Man 3 and you can even see Mega Man, in his little grey speedos, crotchdance all over the enemy with the Top Spin. This is all to say that I don’t think Top Man will ever be your type, darling, but at least he won’t hit on you all the time.

Verdict: REJECT… BUT KEEP AS A CLOSE FRIEND

Snake Man (DWN-022)

Well, certainly I hope you’re not the type of lady to broadcast your dating woes or distaste of men all over social media. You find that the people who do this, they kindly warn everyone about “all the snakes out there.” Bit of an ignoble animal, the snake, and ‘snakelike’ certainly shouldn’t be the main descriptor of the man you’d hope to date. Snake Man here is the king of the snakes. Probably. Something like that, anyway. Honestly, I can’t see what kind of use a Snake Man robot would have in an industrial or home setting. At least Fire Man can probably de-ice your car in the morning or something. This guy just exists to produce more snakes, be a bad date, and overall be a pretty slippery individual. Don’t let him fool you into thinking he’s got a trousersnake, whatever you do.

Verdict: REJECT

Spark Man (DWN-023)

I’m sure you’ve been on plenty of dates in your time, at least I hope you have. Online profiles have all but ended the idea of true blind dating, meaning that lookswise, you’ll always know what you’re getting into ahead of time, even with filters and angles taken into account. This means that when the date does come, the only thing left to be taken care of is that crucial spark. Without the spark, it’ll just be another fruitless first date - nice, hopefully, with a gentleman. But ultimately unfulfilling, leaving a hole, no real resolution, only frustration. Spark Man gives everyone that spark without even trying. He definitely takes the award for Mega Man 3’s Hottest Bachelor. Next time you’re on a hopeless first date, and you’re desperate for any kind of out, take a look around and see if you can spy a couple having a much better date than you. Nine times out of ten, it’ll be Spark Man on one side of the table, killer lines just falling out of his mouth, his date completely enamoured, and you’re left ruing what might have been.

Verdict: PASS - HOTTEST BACHELOR!

Shadow Man (DWN-024)

Shadow Man is essentially a ninja, or at least some dark assassin who strikes in the night. As such, you’re never really going to see too much of him. During the night, he’ll be out doing ninja-y things, and during the day, he’ll probably be resting up before going after his next target. And who’s to say that won’t be you, waking up dead the next morning? Much as I have a great kinship with those who only stir at night, I’m only seeing potential relationship problems here. The daytime is when Shadow Man should be taking you on fun little dates, like teaching you how to throw ninja death stars and how to glide over water. And at nighttime, Shadow Man should be there, in the bed beside you, so you can roll over and cuddle with him. But he won’t be there - he’ll be off gallivanting, one of those guys who’s completely married to his job. He’s cool and mysterious and plays by his own rules and all that, all of which tends to find favour with ladies. But Shadow Man is plainly hopeless as a prospective boyfriend or future husband for those looking for a more mature relationship. Better just leave him to his little assassinations and childish espionage.

Verdict: REJECT

To Be Continued!

The Mega Man Bachelors (Part 2)

As I understand it, dating no longer exists in the modern age. Oh sure, you can download an app and get talking to what appears to be a prospective boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife. A soulmate, even. But nope, I’m sorry, you’re just talking to an artificial intelligence. In fact, how do you know you’re not the only human out there in an ocean of robotic AI?

Pretty soon, your only dating options are going to be half-robot, half-man freakazoids. This is one of the many reasons why the Mega Man franchise, far from the overpriced, unoriginal, heavily outdated waste of time we all thought it to be, is in fact incredibly prescient - don’t be fooled by the cutesy colours, this series is an allegory for the dystopian, robohell futures awaiting us all.

But we all need a bit of companionship, especially in the toughest times, right? So, to ease the existential pain of being a doomed human, I’d like to filter through some more of the eligible Robot Master men of the Mega Man series, and present some dating options and opinions to you. I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a matchmaker, so why can’t that extend to robots too? Let’s take a look at unquestionably the best Mega Man classic game, Mega Man 2. How will its cadre of men hold up?

Metal Man (DWN-009)

If you love your jewellery, and I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t, then you might have to bin Metal Man off immediately because his Metal Blades cut through anything, absolutely anything. He’ll almost never run out of blades to throw, either. But even more concerning than that, is the fact that he himself crumbles to dust on contact with other metal. It’s some sort of Ghostbusters, don’t-cross-the-streams Egon Spengler type stuff. And it means that Metal Man ain’t the resilient, reliable fortress of a man you might have been expecting.

Verdict: REJECT

Air Man (DWN-010)

Now we’re talking. Air Man might just be the quintessential Robot Master, in my opinion. Him or Guts Man, at least. Air Man’s got everything - he looks mean, he’s got an interesting gimmick, and he’s a straightforward guy. You understand everything you need to know about Air Man simply by looking at him. And indeed, airmen exist in real life, usually wearing sexy uniforms with epaulettes and insignias and emblems. If you’re from warm climates, this guy could even keep you well air-conditioned. Forget the Mega Man Bachelors - expect to see swarthy Air Man on the cover of all the glossy glam magazines sometime soon. I deem him the Hottest Bachelor of Mega Man 2.

Verdict: PASS - HOTTEST BACHELOR!

Bubble Man (DWN-011)

I’ve always found this fella to suffer a bit from the same syndrome as Ice Man from Mega Man 1; he looks less like a killer robot, and moreso like some chap who put on some scuba gear and decided to hop around the water, calling himself Bubble Man to anyone who’d listen. Then he dies in about three hits. Seriously, he must be one of the weakest Robot Masters in Mega Man history. So he doesn’t look the part, nor does he walk the walk. The absence of a mouth indicates that he won’t talk the talk, either, so you’ll have to do the talking for both. That mightn’t be so bad, actually. But would you want to end up with a guy who never takes his flippers off?

Verdict: REJECT

Quick Man (DWN-012)

Well, I’m not so sure a Robot Master who is much-vaunted for being quick is the road you want to travel down. All good relationships have their honeymoon period, where things are very exciting. It all settles down eventually, of course, since there’s only so much physical energy one can expend. But there are all kinds of little milestones that a relationship reaches organically over time. That’s what makes it so exciting and rewarding. Do you want to speed through that? If he was called Quickie Man, he might score some points. But this impatient bugger? Leave him well alone, ladies, he just wants to rush things.

Verdict: REJECT

Crash Man (DWN-013)

Forgive me for generalising, but I’m sure most women typically want a man who’s good with his hands. Or at least, one who hasn’t got violent drills for hands. And we were never quite sure if this guy was called Clash Man or Crash Man. Neither of them sound like promising personality traits for any kind of relationship. Although there are some people out there who love stirring up arguments with their partners. If that describes you, then maybe Clash Man could be your guy, and you could have constant tiffs with each other. If, on the other hand, you’ve always wanted your partner to crash the car with you in it, then go for Crash Man.

Verdict: JURY’S OUT

Flash Man (DWN-014)

It’s possible that I’ve put more thought into the dateability and viability of these Robot Masters more than anyone else on the planet. Hence it may fall to me to determine whether the words in each Robot Master’s name is an adjective, or a verb. If ‘Flash’ is an adjective here, then that bodes well, in that he’s flashy and a bit of a show-off. He’ll make you look good, as well. But if ‘Flash’ is a verb here… well, it won’t be long before he starts sending you unwanted pictures, or worse, exposing himself in front of you. And if he freezes you in place with his Time Stopper attack during this… watch out.

Verdict: JURY’S OUT

Heat Man (DWN-015)

It appears Dr. Wily took the classic Zippo lighter, enlarged it, gave it eyes, and called in Heat Man. And having a chap like this in your life is always handy if you need a cigarette lighter. But aren’t all the young ladies vaping these days anyway? I fear Heat Man has become superfluous. Or maybe he always was, when put in direct competition with that paragon of warmth, Fire Man. I reckon Heat Man would be a great laugh among the lads, for lighting our farts on fire and all that sort of malarkey. He may not be quite ready or mature enough for a relationship with a lady just yet, however.

Verdict: REJECT

Wood Man (DWN-016)

I know you’re not here for crap double-entendres, so I’ll spare you any jokes at Wood Man’s expense, at all our expenses really. To the untrained eye, the one who can’t see true beauty, he’s just a ridiculous large man with a tree stump on his head for some reason. But, if I’ve learned anything from loitering at the gymnasium, it’s that a lot of women like men who resemble a giant, well-carved oak tree. His weapon of choice, the Leaf Shield, also serves a defensive purpose as well, and being able to defend and keep your lady safe is paramount to any aspirational man. Just make sure you’re not too hot, as in smoking hot. That kind of hotness never ends well for Wood Man.

Verdict: PASS

To Be Continued!

The Mega Man Bachelors (Part 1)

As you may know, I often take a seat beside a roaring fire with a nice, strong drink in hand, as I begin to ruminate and postulate out loud. You may be picturing a beautiful country estate here, specifically a moonlit room, lined with high-minded books.

Occasional rumbles of thunder punctuate the scene, there’s a dog sleeping by the fire, and finally there’s me, sat on a red velvet armchair in my smoking jacket with a glass of Cognac.

But perish the thought - that’s not my scene at all. Yes, I’m drinking by the fire. But I’m more likely to be found drinking tallboys next to an out-of-control bonfire here, while sat on an upturned milk crate. And the dog is a flea-bitten stray.

Anyway, as I indulge in this Friday evening delight, I’m always thinking of my next feature to pen. When I raised the possibility of doing a Hot-or-Not showcase on all of the marriageable girls in the Harvest Moon series, the boys all threw their empty cans at me, telling me that I should be on a register. One or two even called me sexist. Can you believe that?

Well, to silence the boys, I’ve instead come up with a female-friendly feature that is simply not to be missed - a look at all of the Robot Masters of the long-running Mega Man series, and their eligibility as bachelors.

I know you’ll think it strange, showing you some eligible robo-husbands. But I’m just getting ahead of the curve. Since we’re all due to be taken over and governed by robots any day now, we may well get to the stage where your only choices are to either marry a robot, or travel to the ends of the world to find a human male who hasn’t been desecrated by smoothie blenders gone mad.

Hence, I’ve taken the liberty of doing a public service and producing The Mega Man Bachelors list - your little black e-book, that may just help you towards robotic matrimony. We’ll start, of course, with the game that gets left on the shelf more than any title in the series - Mega Man 1. Please do enjoy.

Cut Man (DLN-003)

You may be wondering about the serial numbers given with each Robot Master, and why, with Cut Man, we start at DLN-003. Well, DLN-001 is Mega Man himself, and given that he has beaten every single Robot Master on our list in battle, that makes him a sort of ultracool mix of Brad Pitt, Jesus and Shaft. So, we may have look at him another time. DLN-002 is Roll, Mega Man’s little sister - we’d better leave her out as well, at least for now. Then we’ve got Cut Man, built by the friendly Dr. Light, probably for opening all his fan-mail, or perhaps trimming that glorious beard of his. Cut Man has turned bad now, but you could turn him back to the side of good with some kissin’ and canoodlin’. There’ll be no better man for cutting your wedding cake. Or cutting the umbilical cord of your first-born robo-child.

Verdict: PASS

Guts Man (DLN-004)

What can you say about Guts Man? He really is all man. So much so that, over the past 40 years, we never really asked what exactly the ‘Guts’ part was supposed to mean. When it comes down to it, most women are really just looking for a manly man. In this robot-ridden hellworld, you won’t find many manly men, but a manly robot like Guts Man is the next best thing. He’ll do all the heavy DIY around the house, and he’ll even enjoy it. Then he’ll give you a big cuddly hug afterwards, because he’s that kind of guy.

Verdict: PASS

Ice Man (DLN-005)

Now, I didn’t intend on being highly offensive in these features. At least, not in the very first part of this series - I would rather ease the reader in to my inflammatory prose, gently. But, am I terribly bigoted for pointing out that Ice Man… doesn’t really look like a robot at all? It’s just a silly, big-eyed dude in a parka. I hardly think he’ll give you his coat if you get too cold. Even if he did, he’d just be naked. Scary, bare, naked metal, like something from The Terminator. We’re trying to avoid the robopocalypse, if you don’t mind.

Verdict: REJECT

Bomb Man (DLN-006)

I know some women just love gossip, and no, we won’t have an argument about that point. Actually, we all love a bit of gossip, let’s be honest. And Bomb Man is your man for news through the grapevine - he just loves to drop bombshells on you. Get it? Well, actually, any relationship where one party frequently drops bombs on the other can’t be a particularly happy one. A good relationship has both of its participants on the same page, you know? Love the mohawk, and the propensity with bombs, but I’m sorry Bomb Man - you’re just a bit too explosive to handle.

Verdict: REJECT

Fire Man (DLN-007)

I would have quickly disregarded this guy as being far too dangerous for a healthy relationship; you’d go to kiss his forehead and end up with singed eyebrows. But, from what little I know about women, I know that you often run cold, extremely cold at that. Or maybe that’s just a symptom of living in Ireland. Regardless, a source of fire is always attractive to gals like you, and Fire Man provides just that. Probably not a good idea to get him angry, though, especially if you live in a wooden lodge, or a cottage with a thatched roof.

Verdict: PASS

Elec Man (DLN-008)

For whatever archaic, obscure reason, no Robot Master in the original Mega Man comes equipped with more than four letters to their name. This works out in Elec Man’s favour - I picture him as exactly the kind of physical worker guy with a blunt, undeniably masculine name like Lee or Dean. If you’re the refined sort of lady who sometimes fancies a bit of rough, Elec Man is your… man, I suppose, but robot moreso. He’s the best electrician in the series, he’s tough, and he’s extremely dependable - there’s no way you could beat the original Mega Man game without this guy’s help. I’d place Elec Man as the Hottest Bachelor in the game. He faces some stiff competition for that title from the evil villain Dr. Wily, and his not-at-all stiff eyebrows, but that’s all.

Verdict: PASS - HOTTEST BACHELOR!

Time Man (DLN-00A)

You couldn’t say this guy was very timely at all, it took him years to join the Mega Man 1 roster. In fact, he’s only ever made an appearance in the nigh-forgotten PSP title, Mega Man Powered Up, and nothing since in the past 20 years. Much as I’d love to encourage you to give any robo-guy a chance, I would understand your hesitance in choosing to date someone who hasn’t had a date in decades. Still, if you wanted to throw Time Man a bone, I’d have every respect for you. I suppose it comes down to the kind of partner you want; if you’re regimented and always on time for things, Time Man will complement you well. If you’re more laissez-faire, not given to getting out of bed when your alarm clock tells you to, then you may find Time Man’s constant interruptions to be untimely, not to mention unwanted.

Verdict: REJECT

Oil Man (DLN-00B)

New to the roster of Mega Man 1 Robot Masters, Oil Man is a slick-talking dude, as you’d expect. He’s also a dab hand on his oily skateboard, which might make him a sort of oily Marty McFly. So he’s cool, in a certain sense, and a pretty valuable resource too. If you’re a bit of a gold-digger, and I shan’t judge you if you are, then you can’t do much better than a Man made of black gold. A word of caution though - you won’t be able to have any physical encounters with him without getting yourself all oiled up. Which might be alright, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Verdict: PASS

To Be Continued!

Kid Icarus (1987)

Look, we’re all man or woman enough to admit it: when we were daydreamers, back in idyllic times, long before any ambition or aspirations we may have had were crushed beneath the indiscriminate gold-tasselled boot of the ultra-capitalist bourgeoisie, we wanted to make our own video games.

It seemed like the absolute dream job. Our wish to be the brainchild behind Super Mario Bros. 9, to be the one who would soak up all the plaudits, it was a wish that took real pride of place in our list of unlikely careers, alongside astronaut… rock star… Hollywood actor… or in my own tragic case, my desire to be a mega-paid hand-model. With some fast-food tasting on the side.

We know now that it’s just about futile and impossible to make any kind of vocation fun, even when it involves our own hobbies. In fact, that’s probably the quickest way to make yourself hate something – depend on it for a living, while having to put up with incompetence all around you, maybe even having to report to some obstinate fool above you.

Experience in the real world, impossible bureaucracy and ruthless next-quarter have all come together and taught us the needlessly harsh lesson - even a job in game development is fraught with terribly stressful risk.

You might really strike the jackpot and get a cushty job with Nintendo, making some Mario sports game that, at worst, will just leave fans mildly disappointed. But for the most part, you can probably strap yourself in for months upon months of testing the same areas of some mediocre iOS game that your superior has come up with, before reporting on your dismal progress in a series of mind-crushingly dull meetings.

The shameful excuse for a game you’ve thrown up is now due for release, although by this stage, seppuku has crossed your mind a dozen times. You don’t go through with it (this time), and your game is released to those worst kind of reviews – average ones.

You had already written off any and all chance that this game you’d painstakingly given two years of your life to could be one of the greats; you were just left hoping that it wouldn’t be savaged by the critics. Now, though, with everyone reacting to your latest creative work with a collective shrug, you’re beginning to wish you hadn’t bothered.

Maybe you shouldn’t have re-emerged from under those coats, the ones you hid under that one weekend when things really came crashing down. The weekend when some oaf vomited all over the original concept art, or when the collision detection programming was found to damaged so badly even Bill Gates couldn’t repair it.

Even a Metacritic score of less than 20 would have been better for your game, because at least people actively buy bad games. But who wants to purchase mediocrity? Certainly not the little people, with all their little dollars.

In any case, your name is tarnished forever, if you were good enough to even have a name, and it’s a downgrade to Mahjong games and minor sports simulators for you – if you’re lucky. But hey, at least you can dust yourself down and try again, eh?

All of this is why, when I hear legions upon legions of unpleasable fans of the Super Smash Bros series screaming online threats, insults and cries for help at its leading man, Masahiro Sakurai, I can’t help but feel sorry for this mild gaming celebrity who I’ll never meet.

He has what appears to be an unenviable task: trying to keep about a zillion 12-year-olds happy. Now, you will have heard such 12-year-olds on online FPS games, I know you have. And you’ll recognise at once what an absolutely thankless task it is to keep their likes happy.

Still, the best he can do here is try to pander to fans of every series represented in Smash, by giving them all equal love as much as he possibly can. He does break this rule with Kirby sometimes, but that’s OK – he created Kirby, you know. That’s his pink baby.

But he really doesn’t help himself with the bias towards another series he’s become affiliated with, this being the decidedly average Kid Icarus. Even now, I see people clamouring for a re-release of Icarus Uprising for the 3DS, a game that was supposed to herald a grand return to the series and the renaissance of a true Nintendo hero.

Now, unlike those 12-year-olds who I always enjoy making myself feel superior to, I’m not naive enough to believe that Sakurai being the lead designer of a game means that all executive marketing decisions are down to him entirely.

Still, someone like Sakurai, with all his pedigree, tried his very best with the most recent Kid Icarus game, and it was still pretty poor, in my opinion. And this provokes an interesting experiment: why don’t we see where it all began for the Kid Icarus fella, and conclude whether or not he deserves any of the preferential treatment?

So we look at Kid Icarus for the NES. It was either that, or a thoroughly depressing Game Boy half-sequel to the original, which I reeeeeeaaaalllly couldn’t get my head together for. That one might be useful as a sedative, if you want to track down a copy.

In Kid Icarus for the NES, you play as Pit, the wannabe angel who must journey from the Underworld to the Overworld and become a fully-fledged celestial being. Along the way, he’ll also need to find some sacred treasures, before destroying the villain, Medusa. So you’re not even a proper angel to start off with, as evidenced by your character’s very poor controls, bad jumping ability and overall lack of strength.

Even the start of the game is a bit downbeat and miserable, as you struggle to haul angel butt up the vertically scrolling levels, each of them with a non-inspiring black background. You need to leap all the way up to the top of these labyrinths, and avoid falling down the bottomless pit (little pun for you there) that you’ve just created by scrolling the screen upwards.

It’s a little like how you couldn’t go backwards in the original Super Mario Bros., except if you tried to do it, touching the invisible wall would just make it get fed up and it would instantly kill you instead. I suppose that’s the only way they can really create bottomless pits, that much necessary staple of platform gaming, in a vertical scroller.

But it’s not as if they needed to make this game any harder. In Kid Icarus, you have two real choices of getting on by: one, you can try to limp up through the levels as pacifistically as possible, avoiding all fighting with the enemies, and you’ll find yourself sorely lacking in health and weaponry as a result.

Or two, you can stop and grind for hearts in every level, the hearts functioning as currency in this game. Grinding like this, you can build up a big enough points tally early on, just what you need to boost your health from the piddly little half-amount you start off with.

A platform game with grinding elements? Christ, no thanks. You’ve either got to sink a lot of time into moribund level after moribund level, each with hideously repetitive music droning on in the background. Or you can get through the levels in a quicker fashion, meaning you’ll suffer the game’s unforgiving difficulty as it never even so much as cracks a smile at you. What’s the point in that?

As for your character’s weapon, you’ll not believe it. Do you remember how, for the first 5 minutes of Metroid and Metroid Zero Mission, your beam travelled the length of a bee’s willy and you had to go find the Long Beam to get a bit of range? Well, the weak little arrows that Pit fires travel even shorter, the length of a… bee’s pube.

So you’re there trying to grind heart currency, from all kinds of flying enemies which are far more manoeuvrable than your angel in the making, and the whole challenge just puts you off. Kid Icarus is a game where you are constantly up against it, and the game’s lack of direction means things are hardly gonna get better, even when the action turns to a more conventional side-scrolling platformer.

Getting caught by a Grim Reaper enemy is probably the nadir of this whole package: his eyes bulge… he sends tough enemies after you… a truly awful cacophony begins playing which must be heard to be believed… beyond that, there’s those enemies that turn your head into an eggplant… stripping you of all your abilities and forcing you to backtrack… and… oh, what’s that?

In a fit of rage, you’ve ripped the game out of the console! You’ve fired an Arrow of Light through it! And you’ve put on a different NES game that didn’t decide to flout every platforming game convention known to man!

And so, Kid Icarus lay as a dormant, forgotten joke for years. It’s probably just a tiny bit better than something like Ice Climber, but that means absolutely nothing. If I programmed this game, I would be ashamed for my life. Sure, it’s easy to be a critic. But it would probably be even easier to program a game that’s better than Kid Icarus.

10 July 2026

F-Zero Climax (2004)

I know every Formula 1 fan has their own idea of when the sport went into terminal decline. I know I do, yet still I tune in every week. But when classic circuits start getting chopped up, or chopped from the calendar altogether, in favour of places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, then the writing’s on the wall - and with their human rights records, that message may well be written in blood.

If you haven’t seen what they did to the Hockenheim Circuit in Germany, then this is your trigger warning. In the good old days, racing circuits were abandoned old airfields where you could almost hear and smell the bombs blowing up. Or they were in glamourous cities, where health and safety didn’t really apply and crashing into the sea was a real hazard.

Or finally, the races took place on broken-up roads in forests, and in the near-inevitable event of a driver fatality, it would take days to find his smouldering remains in a bush. That’s what classic F1 circuits were like, none of those gauche NASCAR ovals. Those circuits are where legends were forged, where the best of the best laid down rubber.

It’s all too professional and safe now, of course. F1, under the invincible Bernie Ecclestone’s watch, sold its ass as we came into the professional era. This meant that even the circuit administrators at iconic locations like Silverstone, Spa and Monza had to stump up tens of millions to renew their contract every few years, and they’ve sometimes struggled to do it. Step forward the nouveau riche countries, the hellholes built on the broken backs of indigenous workers.

It’s beyond parody at this stage. They really do have a race in Saudi Arabia now, for probably the next 400 years, where the F1 management really tried to sell their clever new slogan “We Race As One”, while also ensuring Black Lives Matter and Pride flags weren’t on display. Bit of a dissonance there, eh? How does any of that make sense?

Whatever about the human rights abuses and sportswashing - I’m too jaded and too used to that in F1 by now - my real qualm is with the newer circuit designs. And this is where I have to call out Hermann Tilke, the man who somehow managed to bag himself that handy gig of sole track designer in F1.

God I hate him. Actually, I don’t really hate anybody, but he reminds me of those extras you see in pubs in films, drinking as much free alcohol as he likes and not having to spend a copper coin. How can you not hate someone who’s landed the plum role you’ve always wanted?

I already know I’m a better race track designer than Tilkey, because I have much more practice. I’ll have you know that in my youth, I filled jotter after jotter, notepad after notepad, with my own race tracks. And unlike Tilke’s designs, mine had wonderfully unique features.

His tracks are characterised by being counter-clockwise; having 50km long straights smashing into 90 degree turns (specifically designed to hide that unfortunate, unadvertisable fact - that F1 cars cannot overtake each other); being about 15 turns too long; having a ridiculous pit entry/exit; and usually being situated in a place full of resident Instagram and Tiktok influencers, otherwise known as the dregs.

Not looking good for old Tilkey, is it? And it’s gonna get worse for him, because let me tell you my track characteristics: my tracks are defined by turns sharp enough to slash your tyres; 5-minute laptimes; speeds that’ll almost certainly cause a fatality if two drivers were to crash; generally no tyre barriers or safety measures. And jumps, plenty and plenty of jumps. A few alternative routes around the course wouldn’t be unheard of either. And there’s nowhere for the crowd to sit either, because my tracks are situated thousands of feet in the air.

Alright, alright, maybe I should cut Tilkey a bit of slack here. Perhaps it’s really not that easy to design a track, plus all the thoroughfare around it. But I’ve got a trump card up my sleeve - there’s a way for me to test out my “avant-garde” designs. It’s F-Zero Climax, the Japan-only 2004 GBA denouement to the F-Zero anime’s “story”, and the latest full-release game to rev its engine in the flatlining F-Zero series.

My God, my gentle Jesus, I will take a breath here, but do you know how long I’ve been waiting for an official F-Zero track editor?! F-Zero X did have a great Track Designer expansion kit, again Japan-only, which I would have loved, but at least the bloodthirsty X Cup was often enough for me.

But F-Zero Climax struck me with its unique selling point, right out of the stable. I spent more time in this game’s track editor than anywhere else in the game, possibly because the rest of the game was entirely Japanese, apart from an English-speaking track announcer.

Language doesn’t matter much in racing games, true, although there are lots of vignettes and story cards in this game, all in Japanese, which would have been nice to understand. We’re joining the story at a crucial time too, because as the name would suggest, this game takes place towards the tail-end of the F-Zero anime, which barely got off the starting blocks in either territory.

I also regret to inform you that Captain Falcon’s famous, mercurial Falcon Punch that he used to sacrifice himself and send Black Shadow to the Shadow Realm, that moment hasn’t made it into this game. I suppose you couldn’t have a scene like that in two different entertainment mediums; there would have been complaints from parents that their children’s eyes had exploded not just once, but twice.

Apart from all that though, this game is a vast improvement on the vanilla, Plain Jane F-Zero GP Legend. That game was sterile, not at all dangerous, a Tilkedrome in Sochi or Shanghai. F-Zero Climax is the days of cigarette sponsorship and playboy acceptance, voracious sexual appetites, classic Zolder or Monza.

It’s got a Master difficulty mode, it’s got loads more tracks, including differing track and cup variations, it’s mighty difficult to unlock all the machines, the art is a lot better, and when you race the opposition AI, they’re a whole lot more aggressive.

Better music, better track design, a more sensibly chosen 3-lap race length, which almost becomes too short considering the mega high speeds you can attain in this game, so much so that the whole screen starts shaking.

And when all that’s said and done, you can head on back to the beautiful Track Editor where you can even share and input other people’s designs. Mind you, I say ‘share’, but it’s a manual-as-all-hell input of numbers and codes. No QR codes in them days. But it works, and that’s all that matters.

Really, the GameCube’s F-Zero GX is my lasting memory of this beloved series of mine, nearly 20 years laid up in the garage by this stage, rusting away. But I urge you to “acquire” F-Zero Climax as soon as you can, and head on into the Track Editor for infinite 2D racing F-Zero fun. Just make sure you create some better autodromes than old Tilkey, eh?

26 June 2026

Kid Icarus: Uprising (2012)

I want you to throw away any good mood you may have had, and try to think about the people who annoy you most in your day-to-day life. To give you my own example, I am frequently aggravated, to the point of gnashing and grinding of teeth, by one particular commuter who gets the bus with me.

When I share a deck with this guy, I always know about it - because he decides to spend his journey phoning other people all the time, and I do mean all the time. I'm serious, this clown must go through his entire contacts list, those people idiotic enough to give their number to him anyway. Then he calls them up and wants to knwo how they’re doing. Can you believe that?

I could almost handle it if the conversations had any juice in them at all - I love to eavesdrop on those recently released criminals who I also share a bus with, because when they're talking about prison riots, dirty protests and people getting filled in with hacksaws, you cannot help but take notice.

But this telephonic bête noire of mine just talks about the most mundane rubbish about his day to anybody who would listen. It's not like he's some doddery old fool either, he can't be that much older than me - and before you laugh, I ain't doddery. Not yet, anyway. What was the question again?

No sooner has the most tedious chatterbox in the world finished one conversation, then he’s straight onto the next pigeon. The people on the other side, even they’re sick of him - they start pretending their phone network is dying. I know this because I’ll be listening to our man saying "hello?", "are you still there?" and "what's your favourite humming noise?" a dozen times.

And do you know what he does then? By God, you've got it in one - he calls them back and he actually says, "sorry, I think I lost you there." He's got no shame, this lad. Well, his type never do, do they?

There are remedies to situations like this, of course. Don’t get the bus, that’s probably the easiest solution, but needs must. Noise-cancelling headphones, they’re an absolute necessity. They’ve got to be the best invention since sliced bread. But what you can’t beat is a good portable game to sink your teeth into, any attempt to drown out the banal noise around you.

Things on my commute don’t get much better for me, though, because I’m having to deal with a different annoyer - my old friend Pit, start of the latest and hopefully last Kid Icarus game, Uprising for the Nintendo 3DS.

One thing you may already know about me is that I have what you'd call a hate-hate relationship with the Kid Icarus series. The first game on NES was absolute cack and then they spat out a Game Boy version which was even worse, but possibly found favour with tedious types - like my friend on the bus.

Obviously I wasn’t counting down the days to Kid Icarus: Uprising’s release, then. But when I witnessed more than one online imbecile saying that it was one of the best games ever, a great update to the series, a very funny piece of work, it will make your private parts tingle et cetera et cetera, well, even an ignorant swine like me sits up and takes notice. After all, the game’s development and production was spearheaded by that man Sakurai, creator of the Smash Bros. series - and that’s a pedigree worth calling someone about.

You're always worried that an extremely hard-working man like Sakurai is only a few bad days away from going completely over the top, Falling Down style. And I reckon Kid Icarus was the straw that broke the man's back here. Firstly, you would not believe the control scheme in this game. Retailers probably couldn't believe it either, when the game came to them, contained in a larger cardboard box which included an entire dedicated plastic stand to put your 3DS on, for God's sake.

Not much room on the bus to get a plastic podium installed, so I’d have to do without. I don’t think it even works well with lefties like myself, but anyway. Without the stand, you’ll need one hand to hold the 3DS, one hand to hold the stylus, and one hand to use the buttons, and… ah. We’ve got a problem.

You were born with the regulation two human hands, I assume? The good news is, this would mean you’ve got more hands than the global average. The “bad” news is that KI:U is not the game for you - anyone with less than three paws simply need not apply. So maybe your dog could get some wear out of Uprising, although I suspect he'd whine at the prospect, or growl at it and bury both the game and the ridiculous hunk of plastic out your back garden instead.

When you do actually play the game, I’ll give Sakurai and the team some credit, it’s not quite like any game you’ve played before. It’s not a moribund side-scroller like the previous two Kid Icarus games, which is positive. It’s got two different playstyles - some of the levels sees Pit flying through the clouds, shooting enemies flying-rail shooter style, though not even half as fun as Star Fox.

Other levels see you on the ground, where you move around the world, not quite freely but not quite on rails, smashing foes and finding items with all kinds of different weapons, the design of which are often unappealing.

In similar fashion to the Smash Bros. games, you can choose your own difficulty, kind of like a gambling system - change the difficulty from between 0.0 to 9.0 intensity, and the more you push things to the edge and make it harder for yourself, the better loot and swag you can obtain.

I do like that system, though it’s a pain to bring up the difficulty and nearly make it to the end, only to get clobbered. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the way I play or I was trying to take too much out of the Intensity system, but it seemed like I had just one hit-point left for 90% of my time in this game.

The graphics are fairly nice for 3DS standards, and the highlight of the game may be the fully voice-acted dialogue between Pit and the Goddess of Light, Palutena, who gives these missions to Pit. There’s also the wise-cracking Goddess of Nature, Viridi, who takes Pit down a peg or twelve every time she can.

She’d probably be the bet character, with the worst character being the silly attempt at an evil doppelganger character, Dark Pit, who was inexplicably added to Smash Bros. Between them all, there’s lots and lots of conversations. You know I’m sensitive to excessive phone calls, and there’s probably too much tedious yapping in this game as well, but some of it will make you laugh.

Well, this one is a lot better than the other Kid Icarus games, that much is certain. But if fans of this game thought the 3DS title would jump-start a whole new subseries of Kid Icarus games and establish it as one of Nintendo’s strongest franchises, I’m afraid they were sorely mistaken. Uprising, for its part, isn’t too bad, not very annoying - just highly, highly forgettable. In that sense, it’s a funner use of your time than listening to someone’s monotonous phone conversations on the bus - but only just.

24 July 2026

F-Zero: GP Legend (2004)

You won’t want to know this, but there’s a lot of things they do in Japan that not many of us know about. We all wondered whether sexbots could actually be feasible, and they went and did it.

Their toilets have a dedicated button to powerhose what the Americans call fanny and what the Americans don’t call fanny. Go into just about any shop and the most hardcore hentai imaginable is available, not even at eye-level, but right in your face.

That brings us to anime adaptations, where the list is long, too long really. We all know about the Pokémon anime, and who can forget Sonic X? But there were also adaptations for game series that could never, ever be commercially viable. Kirby had an anime, for one. I recently found out about a PaRappa the Rapper anime, for God’s sake. But even I was surprised to find out there was an anime for that not-so-golden egg, F-Zero.

They sure kept that a secret from me. Although, considering the last scene of the series is an unmasked Captain Falcon leaping out of his F-Zero machine to deliver a Falcon Punch of the Gods directly into the main villain’s face, it was only a matter of time before such a work came to my attention.

Falcon’s last-ditch attack on Black Shadow, a mid-air leap mind you, burns the villain into oblivion and causes a massive explosion which can be seen from space, while a J-Rock theme blares in the background. I know I’ve just spoiled the entire denouement of the 51 episode anime, but why else would you watch it?

You wouldn’t watch it for the actual racing, because God, this is some low budget stuff. Whenever the characters actually stop flapping their gums and get onto the track, the racing sequences are these weird 3D animation sequences, very 2003. It reminded me a bit of those 3D sequences in The Bots Master, and I never thought I’d make a reference like that, but at least here you won’t need 3D glasses to enjoy this.

I may heavily criticise Nintendo for leaving F-Zero as dormant as they have, but I can’t deny that, with F-Zero GX, three GBA games and an anime series (albeit very sparse in budget), Nintendo properly gave the series a wrestling-style push. And it still didn’t work. I hate to say it, but F-Zero wasn’t even doomed to be a jobber, even after all that. All it could do is fade into obscurity, while its very few die-hard fans mourned.

It’s just a pity that one of the two Game Boy Advance games that spawned from the anime, F-Zero GP Legend, simply wasn’t much to write home about. Don’t get me wrong, obviously a fanboy of the series like me would’ve eaten up anything, even back then. These days? Never mind Switch or Switch 2, I’d accept a new F-Zero game in Turd Sandwich format now.

God, we were spoiled for choice back when in the early noughties - three GBA F-Zero titles, if you could source games from Japan. I was so adept at pirating GBA games back in the day that I was playing these before they even hit European shelves - that obviously didn’t help the series make any profit. Then a full-on GameCube game, and if you were really tremendously lucky, an arcade machine variant as well.

Having all this backed by an anime show as well seemed a bit… excessive. And it was. Everything about both the F-Zero GP Legend anime and the F-Zero GP Legend game is perfunctory, although the GBA game manages to be a lot less hardcore.

It is interesting to note that 4Kids Entertainment began dubbing a few episodes of the anime, until it became clear that almost nobody cared. You may remember 4Kids and the infamous censorship they used to impose on the likes of Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh?

Well, trust me, guaranteed they would have neutered the famous Falcon Punch somehow. I can just picture some ridiculous references to the Shadow Realm, or to jelly doughnuts, so it was best that they didn’t sink their claws too much into the series.

F-Zero GP Legend seems to be a 4Kids approved game, that is, it has been sanitised for wetties. It’s not difficult at all, and very curiously it even lacks a Master Mode. I’m sorry, but F-Zero should snap you in two and piledrive you into the ground, especially on the harder difficulties.

The opposition machines in F-Zero SNES and Maximum Velocity could be cruel. The F-Zero GX Story Mode was famously heartbreaking at almost all times. That’s the way it should be, so when you go into this game with even a little bit of expertise with racing games, you’ll quickly find that five laps for each track is far too many, because you have the race all sewn up and the track mostly learnt by Lap 2.

I don’t know if it’s just me being a bit absentminded but I sometimes find I can go “into the zone” playing racing games if they’re too easy - I’m barely even watching the screen, and still I’m doing all the right moves. F-Zero GP Legend is essentially that 10% brain effort, stretched out to a full game. I suppose that’s another thing it has in common with the anime, how even the clinically dumb can follow along.

It’s not all just Grands Prix and boring Time Trials though, you do have link cable multiplayer, though I hardly think many will have tried that. More interesting is the Story Mode - it won’t tear welts and calluses into your hands like F-Zero GX’s story, although it isn’t very fulfilling either.

You’ve simply got eight different characters with their vignettes and different races or goals to complete, alongside some whack story between each chapter. It’s a bit like the story in Advance Wars, if that makes any sense - a load of talking in between the action, and it’s pretty much narrative garbage.

There’s also a fun Mission Mode, where you need to haul ass around sections of the game’s tracks with pre-selected machines to win Bronze, Silver or Gold Cups - it’s the same as Gran Turismo’s License Tests, essentially. That’s where the replay value lies, once you’ve breezed through the main Grand Prix mode. The tracks themselves, by the way, are just OK. You’ve also got some of the old SNES ones in there, some all-time classic circuits which will make you smile for a few minutes.

Even the music can be a bit dull, and that’s heinous for a series like this - I know that just about any GBA soundtrack ends up being thwarted by the system’s lack of grunt in the sound department. But the other two GBA F-Zero games offer so much more, and the composers for this game could have made a far better hash at the squealing pig-guitars from F-Zero X than they did.

Everything about this game is all just so beige, so uneventful, so passé, that I don’t know what to tell you. There’s nothing else to really discuss. It’s just sort of there. In that way, it’s just like the anime. So the only conclusion I can come to, if it makes any sense, is that F-Zero GP Legend may be the most average game of an anime of a game of all time. And that makes it a perfect adaptation.

19 June 2026

F-Zero GX (2003)

Hate to demoralise you on an easy Friday, but I’m here to tell you that you might as well not bother making any effort in life. Take a bit of time now, and ask yourself a question - on a sliding scale of hours spent, versus the probability that your hard work will be recognised and rewarded, where exactly do you stand?

And having worked this out, surely the best course of action is to find that sweet-spot where you can receive 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 dissertation in my final year of college.

In truth, this was just the natural conclusion to the approach that I and 99% of other college students took towards essays, projects, assignments, even end of year exams. Once we all figured out that we could get a passing grade by starting the work on the day before, or sometimes even the morning of, well, what was the point in putting bundles of effort in?

Of course, if you wanted to properly excel, you’d need to put weeks into the damned assignment to get it spot on. But even that’s not a guarantee, because then you’re up against an impersonal marking scheme which might conspire against you, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

I’ve had poor grades from modules that I actually gave a teensy bit of effort to, but in the very same round of results I’d get decent-ish grades (and I’m always happy with decent-ish) from exams where I hadn’t darkened the lecture hall’s door even a single time that term. Where’s the consistency there? The key takeaway - don’t bother.

My radical new hypothesis of hard work not being rewarded is what empowers me to tell you the real reason why a new F-Zero game still hasn’t been released since F-Zero GX. Well, OK, there was the Japan-only F-Zero Climax for Game Boy Advance, but that’s game title is a bit of a giveaway.

What I’m really talking about console juice, because handheld games are never statements of intent for a franchise’s future. Simply put, F-Zero GX had so much sheer effort put into it, for comparatively little return in terms of sales, that neither Nintendo nor a third party will ever be able to top it in such a way that it brings in piles of profit.

You might agree with me when I say that Nintendo will have a hell of a time topping Mario Kart 8 and Smash Bros Ultimate in particular - but at least those two are evergreen. And Mario Kart World hasn’t done the job as such.

Nintendo have already released Mario Kart 8 twice, they could do it a third time on their next console and still get another zillion sales. If they re-released F-Zero GX tomorrow, like they finally did on Switch 2, then me and the 12 other hardcores would lap it up. But it’s not going to get anywhere near the traction that I would have liked. I tell you this though, the effort that Sega and Amusement Visions put into this game and what they delivered is staggering.

I’m going to blind you with numbers here, boring and non-relevant stats really, a lot like that long-forgotten dissertation of mine. But here goes: F-Zero GX has 26 separate tracks, plus a few extras in the 1-Player Story Mode, which itself has nine chapters across three difficulty levels.

Every one of those chapters has its own pre- and post-story scenes with full voice acting and animation, both of which are patently ridiculous. But those CGI cutscenes were a real Sega trademark from that turn-of-the-century era, and I’m grateful to have them.

It doesn’t stop there - there are 41 unique ships as well, and when I say unique I do mean it. Each ship has its own pilot (sometimes more than one), each of them their own distinct character with a biography, their own theme song, and even a Tekken-style ending movie. You can customise and make your own machines too if you’d like, and give them custom designed emblems.

The pre-built ships all have their own distinct look as well, something already established in F-Zero X of course, but now they’ve got their own bios (unseen in the final game), part numbers, a named designer, they even have their own individual turbo-booster sounds, for God’s sake.

Every one of those pilots gets voice acting as well, of a delightfully awful standard - but that campiness, mixed with insane difficulty, is what F-Zero GX is all about. You’ll only get the chance to get a single damn interview question out of each pilot any time you finish a cup. But look up a compilation video of driver interviews and feel the nostalgia-cringe.

That’s an awful lot of effort for a racing game. And the reward for all the developers’ hard work? Disappointing sales, not much of a return on investment, and a Nintendo series that’s been dormant for a lot longer than it’s been active.

I could never contemplate the idea that F-Zero is completely dead. I don’t even have any expectations of it anymore when I watch Nintendo Directs, sure. But then again, who ever thought the Duck Hunt Dog would come back? Who ever thought Nintendo would re-release the Virtual Boy? That’s the kind of blind optimism I’m talking about.

I think the main talking point about this game is its legendary difficulty. There’s an online rant about one of the Story Mode’s chapters that probably sums up the feeling of F-Zero GX far better than anything I can accomplish here, but I’ll just say that even the difficulty levels they let you choose from are badass - it’s Normal, Hard or Very Hard.

No ‘Easy’ or ‘Amateur’ here, no casual ‘I just want to experience the story’ rubbish or anything like that. It’s either perform like a god, or you’re not getting to unlock dream machines like the ‘Silver Rat’ and the ‘Rolling Turtle’, and your vehicle select screen will look a terrible state.

I’m thrilled to tell you that I’ve done all this, and in fact I’ve completed this game 100%, which is probably my proudest gaming achievement. That one definitely took hard work and toil, although what pleases me is that this is one of the very few GameCube games back then that never allowed you to copy completed files from online sources or from other memory cards - it was “do it yourself or naff off”, and that’s the way it should be.

There was also an arcade version of this game, F-Zero AX, which you will have never seen before. There’s never been any in Ireland, I can put it to you that way. This will be Ignorant Statement of the Year, but the arcade was already dead as a dodo in 2003, or even if it still had some life, then the price-gouging was getting ridiculous. I’ve played the Mario Kart Arcade machine twice, and even after you’ve won the race they actually have the temerity to ask you for another quid. No wonder they all died out.

Going back to life at 2000 km/h for a moment, F-Zero GX has incredible speed, and the techno soundtrack is boss as well, although some days I prefer the pig-wailing junk-rock guitars of F-Zero X. The music, the sound effects, the graphics, the campiness, the speed, it’s all here in GX, and it’s all quintessentially F-Zero.

That dissertation of mine, by the way, with its rubbish premise, probably not accurate word count and lack of any coherent argument, may very well be sat rotting on a library shelf somewhere, never to be perused again, which is just the way I prefer it.

You compare that to F-Zero GX, a game that never collects dust, a strong piece of work that the creators can be proud of. That’s because they put their heart and soul into it, and the end result is glorious. Maybe, like the majority of my disser, my theory is a complete crock after all - hard work doesn’t pay off all the time. But it can always be appreciated.

12 June 2026

Punch-Out!! (2009)

Look, can we get one thing straight? National stereotypes are fantastic fun. I’m allowed to say that, because I’m Irish, and we’re the butt of every joke and stereotype in the book. You’ve heard about the Irish electrician who was called in to fix the electric chair at Sing Sing prison, don’t you? He came out afterwards and said it was a good thing they called him when they did - because that thing was a real death-trap.

Then of course there was the Irish firm who won the contract to supply the latest fleet of submarines to the US Navy - our subs are so good, they’re considered unsinkable. You see? That’s a hilarious take on the Paddy factor, that supposed level of a combined stupidity and apathy that defines the Irish mentality. Probably the other things that define us are drinking and fighting, in that order.

But this is where stereotypes can let you down, or at least go out of date, because I do not personally rate Ireland’s drinking and fighting ability all that highly anymore. We do like a bit of binge drinking, sure, probably more than many countries in Europe (I would have just said “the EU”, but we’re not letting the UK off the hook that easily).

But even though our Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights can resemble hell on earth, it’s a long old time since we had the fightin’ rebels we so often sing about - pushing and shoving is the best we do now.

No, I’m afraid our binge drinking has been overtaken by Czechia, our public fighting by Serbia, and I’d say Russia has overtaken us in both regards. That should put an end to these supposed negative stereotypes that Ireland faces. But where I should be offended, instead I just feel disappointed at a national level.

Your stereotypes can get confounded as well. I once met a Finnish girl and immediately got all excited. In the first place, I was surprised to see a Finn out and about, and not home alone drinking in underwear, as they apparently love to do.

Anyway, I spotted my opportunity and began thinking of everything Finnish I could. Sisu! Kossu! Rally! Perkele! Depression! She wasn’t into any of it. I suppose she conformed to the Finnish stereotype of being hilariously bad at small talk, but that was the only stereotype that rang true. I started the chat, and she Finnished it.

National stereotypes, no harm in them, and they only add to the experience in the delightful Punch-Out!! for Wii. Truth be told, the game having released in 2009, it probably arrived just before hysterical social media slammed the door shut on any kind of stereotyping. Perhaps Punch-Out Wii will soon have to be referred to as a “product of its time”, just like those racist old films you’d get in the 50s and 60s.

It’d certainly take you back to the good old days of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out anyway, which is the best endorsement I can give this game. Just about anyone who’s played the NES Punch-Out fell in love with it, and I’ll even be charitable to Mr. Dream for once and say that his version is just as good.

Well, here’s your 3D re-imagining of an old Nintendo franchise, lovingly and gingerly taken out of the archives, spun around and gently laid onto the record player. And they’ve done it - they’ve done justice to a beloved old classic.

It was easy to dismiss the Wii as a casual Just Dance machine for grannies, but it did quite a bit for many of Nintendo’s lesser-known franchises. Now, I’ll caveat that by saying that it did absolutely nothing for F-Zero, which I can never forgive it for. But Punch-Out Wii had a big advertising campaign behind it, a real push, and seeing the old Punch-Out boxers brought to the 3D realm was very exciting.

And they really are all here, in all their nigh-racist glory with the only censorship change being a changing of Piston Honda’s name, to Piston Hondo. That’s it, and actually the Wii title goes a step or two further by making sushi appear when you knock his lights out. So there you go, copyright infringement against a car company is a minefield best worth dodging. But open racism is seemingly okay.

All of the same old faces show up, leaving only one truly new boxer for you to spar with, but fear not; once you batter each of the boxers and bag yourself the World Title, you’ve got to go a step further and defend it in the Title Defence mode, where you’ll rematch all of the boxers who’ve been each undergoing their own Rocky montages in the backgrund.

The end result is that they’ll come back ten times as difficult, way faster and smarter than before. If you’re well familiar with the old NES game, the tricks you learned there will carry you through the first half of the game. But in Title Defence mode, all the rules and patterns change.

It’s a great way to build longevity into the game, and offers some very surprising difficulty. Losing to Glass Joe? It happened to me, and I bet it’ll happen to you too. And when he taunts you in untranslated French, or Soda Popinski laughs at you in Russian or Bald Bull charges at you in Turkish, you’ll feel like the most international punching bag in the world.

The immersive and well done voice-acting, all done in each boxer’s native language (including unintelligible grunts for King Hippo) is just one of the many great, charming little things about this game. There’s plenty more - there’s a fun, local 2-player mode, not too comprehensive but a bit of a laugh.

There’s a super-hard, one-punch knockdown mode if you really want more difficulty. There’s a super secret fighter at the end of it all (not a cel-shaded Mike Tyson, sadly). You can use Wii motion controls if you’re a bit crazy, and you can go crazier still by bobbing and weaving on the Wii Balance Board. It might take some trickery with Wii homebrew these days, but there’s even an add-on where you can fight against your ever-patient trainer, Doc Louis.

Best of all, you’ve got a great soundtrack that has flair and instruments specific to who you’re fighting. So, a cheeky bit of sitar for Great Tiger for example. That’s probably racist too, but oh well, we’re already in too deep now. Best of all, an off-his-rocker Aran Ryan returns as the Irish boxer representative. Listening to him speak, I highly doubt he’s from Dublin, as his in-game bio says. But since when were stereotypes always accurate?

5 June 2026

Super Punch-Out!! (1994)

I’m Irish, which means boxing is in my blood. Mind you, I’ve never actually stepped into the ring mind. Nor have I done anything remotely resembling boxing training. Even if you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t eat that foul pitcher full of egg yolks like Rocky does in that one film.

I can run a little bit, which would surely be useful on fight night, when I come up against some opponent 3 times my size, from a country with a Human Development Index several times worse than Ireland’s. Whether that’s me running at the opponent in anger, or running to safety well away from him, I’ll let you be the judge.

But let’s be honest, pro boxing’s lost something, hasn’t it? It had it, lost it, and now it doesn’t know how to get it back. All this talk of boxing being the noble art and the sweet science and all of that stuff, the reality seems to be that more and more people prefer stuff like UFC - throwing an opponent onto the floor, mudwrestling with them for a bit and then raining hammerblow after hammerblow on their prone body, long after they’ve been knocked unconscious. Not really my cup of tea, to be honest.

Even though I am rapidly getting over the hill, assuming I was ever fit enough to be near the hill in the first place, I still harbour that slight hope that one day, if it all came down to it, I could be that boxer. You know, the great Irish hope that beats up the more glamorous countries and comes away holding belts and Gold Medals and tricolour flags aloft.

When it comes to sending teams over to the Olympics, Ireland generally sends over a parish full of boxers, with the odd sailor and rower and showjumper thrown in to round things off. They all go and do the best they can, but the boxing is always the one to watch.

Watching our sailors and sprinters give their best is always great, and all credit to them. But they don’t throw wild punches at people or try to get sly elbows and headbutts in, do they? Not that Katie Taylor would ever dream of skulduggery like that.

You know who Katie Taylor is, of course? No? Well, she’s only the greatest athlete this country has ever produced, and I’ll go to my grave championing that woman. I do this in the vain hope that she will notice me, which should be any minute now – Katie, if you’re reading this, you’re welcome round for tea any time, chicken.

When she isn’t punching out fools for Gold Medals, she’s scoring goals for Ireland. She took my dreams and made them her own, so I have to respect her for that. But you’ll notice after each and every single one of her 700 boxing victories, she always thanks God for being at her side and giving her strength.

Is it really divine intervention deciding victory for her? As a hell-bound doubting Thomas myself, I’m not really qualified to comment, but I do know that you’ll probably need God in your corner to beat some of the foes in Super Punch-Out.

The original Punch-Out for NES (not really the original at all, but you know what I mean) was all about the underdog story. You took the role of Little Mac, 80lbs of smiley muscle and 3 foot tall to boot. With the help of your not-Apollo Creed trainer, Doc Louis, you took on hulking behemoths who were wider than Mac was tall and had dancing pecs bigger than his head.

Eventually you triumphed to batter Mike Tyson – that’s right, in a colourful and dorky Nintendo game, the baddest man on the planet was waiting for you at the end, surely ranking as the scariest end boss of all time. Although let’s be honest, you didn’t actually beat Tyson. You sort of shambled into the ring, already trembling, before he knocked your head clean off with his first vicious uppercut that left you convulsing, in the man’s own words, “like an infantile retard.”

Obviously Nintendo couldn’t let a convicted rapist headline their next boxing game, so it was all change for the Super Nintendo’s Super Punch-Out. Released to pretty little fanfare, late in the console’s life, this one is a bit of an odd duck. To start with, you don’t even play as a character who could recognisably be called Little Mac.

Doc Louis is at home sleeping, a lot of the most memorable opponents from the NES classic are gone, and each match is only one round of three minutes. There’s no Decision either – if you haven’t done the biz by the time the three minutes are up, whichever fascist in charge of scoring and ringing the bell will announce you as the sad, crushed loser and you will have to suffer the rest of your days with a loss against your record.

Rather quickly, your social invitations will dry up, your wife will run off with your best friend and your children will hate you. But at least you can always have another go, and work out how to beat the next cheating opponent on your way to winning the coveted World Video Boxing Association belt.

And boy, do your opponents cheat. Off the top of my head, you have tricky buggers who’ll charge at you from across the ring, spit at you, headbutt you, aim actual karate kicks at you, break your hands and force you to keep fighting, elbow you, cause localised earthquakes, strike you with canes, and open fire at you with a tactical assault rifle.

I made up that last one, but you well believed it, didn’t you? But the rest of it is all real, and will happen to you frequently. Against all of this monkey business, your counter-offensive consists of ‘honest boxing’, which isn’t really much of a strategy by comparison.

Really, to call Punch-Out a series of boxing games is a short-sighted mistake, perhaps as critical a mistake as thinking that a 450lb clown is going to be a pushover to defeat in the ring. You could liken Super Punch-Out more to a puzzle game, where you need to figure out your opponent’s cues, i.e. know whether they’re going to spit, scream, duck, dodge or throw a flying forearm smash at you from atop the ropes.

Once you know what your ridiculously proportioned foe is going to do, it’s simply a matter of dodging and then slugging him back – or if you’re really brave, countering his punch at the risk of taking a haymaker yourself.

It’s this high-risk, high-reward counter punching play that’ll keep you coming back to Super Punch-Out, trying to improve your times in the ranked time trials. Taking down the world champion in 11 seconds? It’s possible, if you’re skilful enough.

The game can be a bit annoying occasionally, with its one-round rule, some bland opponents (a long way from the goofy national stereotypes from Punch-Out NES) and the cheating will definitely grate on you at times. But it’s OK, those are just fairly mild body blows, nothing that will leave you battered and bruised.

Super Punch-Out gets a bit left in the lurch by the NES original and the really excellent Wii title, and it simply doesn’t have the replay value that those two sluggers have, but this one isn’t too bad. I lap it up, to be honest. It’s just that the game ends up a little bit too much like the boxers it features, and a bit like the boxers of today, really – obviously talented, and occasionally good to watch. But sadly, just a tad forgettable.

29 May 2026

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (1987)

They say sport is the great equaliser, and when it’s as accessible and universal as football – EuroFootball, I mean - then I have to agree. And let’s give sport its dues, it has helped break down a lot of race barriers throughout history.

Of course you’ll still get instances of bananas being thrown onto football pitches by knuckle-dragger fans, and racist chanting or brainless comments online. But as moronic as all that behaviour is, why even give them a moment’s consideration?

After all, how does any of that stupid racism stack up against Muhammad Ali’s fight the other way, when he stood up to the white-as-all-hell United States government and told them he had no quarrel with them Viet Cong? They took his boxing titles, threatened him with jail - and it never made him back down.

Handsome, outspoken, tall and dangerous, Muhammad Ali AKA Cassius Clay AKA The Louisville Lip AKA The Greatest of All Time is a monumental figure in sporting history. There comes a time in everyone’s life when they learn about Ali for the first time, and become inspired by him.

He is iconic, titanic, greater in stature than his 6 foot and 3 inches belied. He is, in that sense, quite a contrast to your playable character in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! for NES. Unfortunately, you ain’t Ali in this, and you ain’t Tyson neither for that matter, although these would have been brilliant fun if you could unlock them.

No, today you are Little Mac, and that’s not just a clever nickname – the poor guy stands about 3-foot tall in that boxing ring. Or maybe all of the opposition boxers are 10-foot tall by 4-foot wide, the game’s graphical perspective makes it difficult to tell. Still, at least Mac’s got a surprising chunk of power in his left and right jabs, more than you might think from a boy his size. He must drink all his milk, see.

He doesn’t just have lefts and rights up his sleeves, though. If you’re willing to take a wee risk, you can counter the opponent’s incoming punches with a punch of your own. This will let you earn a Star which gives you a mighty uppercut, useful when your opponents quite literally tower over you. You’ll never get tired of seeing Mac jump right up into the air to smash opposing fighters on the chin. I never saw Ali having to jump to hit his foes, did you?

They could have done with The Greatest in this game – a more racist lineup of pugilists you will not see. It starts off with the Frenchman who cannot wait to throw up the white flag, the glass-jawed Glass Joe. Yes, I should also mention that the majority of the opponents’ names are puns, in addition to being highly bigoted, so in that respect their names are double jobbing. That’s the sign of an efficient pun, didn’t you know?

You quickly move on to Von Kaiser, with a moustache even thicker than his biceps. I have to admit, given that they decided to parody a warfaring, moustachioed German, I’m just awful glad they didn’t plump for a send-up of Adolf here.

The champion of the Minor Circuit of the World Racist Boxing Association is Piston Honda, presumably fresh from the ultra-modern Japanese production line, and with a pair of caterpillar eyebrows that dance the flamenco.

And speaking of flamencos you’ve got the man himself, Don Flamenco from Madrid, who dances about the ring with a rose in his mouth and a toupee on his head. Is there some sort of national stereotype that the Spaniards are a bit follically challenged? See, I’ve always said that video games are educational. These are the kind of things I’d have never known about.

Anyway, it’s around about this time you begin to figure out that jabbing blindly isn’t the way to get through this game. Probably less than a dozen NES games have anything resembling a ‘learning curve’ built in, really. It’s usually sink or swim, and that swim is often in a pool of hydrochloric acid, as in “we’re gonna kick your ass and tell you to like it.”

But Punch-Out properly eases you in, and while you better believe it gets incredibly tough by the end, at least you can get past the first ten minutes and have some modicum of fun. That’s more than can be said for a lot of NES games. Also, even if you do get knocked the hell out into the mire of brain damage and early retirement, you’ll usually find that the next time you play, you’ll be much better equipped and able to progress farther.

But God, you really do feel every little inch of your four-foot-nothing height in there, as big fat King Hippo bears down upon you like a guffawing Hindenburg in florescent red shorts. You’ll need to bob, weave, duck and dodge, though you might end up forgetting to do some of those, especially ducking. As well as all that, if you keep hitting the opponent’s gloves or let yourself get slapped around a bit, you’ll lose stamina and temporarily tire out.

There are almost rules, though. There’s three rounds of 3 minutes, although they’re not three real minutes, if that makes sense. Yeah, the timer speeds up or slows down depending on how hard you’re currently hammering the opponent, which can work in your favour.

You usually have to knock the opponent out, though – although it’s possible to win by decision, you’ll need a helluva lot of points to get the win. That holds true even if you knocked Mr. Sandman down six times after he hardly laid a glove on you. Corrupt or what?

Later in the game there’s a spate of rematches with boxers you’ve already beaten, now new and improved, and a hell of a lot harder. That’s all before the racial stereotypes culminate with the USSR man Soda Popinski, previously known as – and I’m not joking you here – Vodka Drunkenski.

Wow. I know the whole order of the day for Punch-Out was to send up as many nationalities as possible. That was the joke of the time. And I know this was in the last days of the Cold War. But, did they really have to?!

And I have to love the idea that Nintendo toned down Soda Popinski’s name, but retained all of his dialogue that obviously refers to alcohol. I recognise the signs, you know, having consumed alcohol more than once in my time.

I’m just surprised he didn’t tell everyone that he can’t drive a car because he loves “grape juice”, and that he’s not gonna kill you in the ring, Ivan Drago style, but that he’s going to “defeat” you instead.

And gosh, I haven’t even got to Tyson yet. I could not imagine a scarier end-boss to any game than Mike Tyson. I’m being serious – Giygas is absolutely nowhere compared to Kid Dynamite.

I ought to add that Tyson’s presence in this game preceded his conviction for rape, although it wasn’t that conviction which led to him being removed from the game and replaced in later prints of this game by the no-personality pilchard called Mr. Dream.

No, it was probably Tyson’s surprise loss to James “Buster” Douglas, coupled with the fact that Tyson probably still commanded a massive fee at the time (before his several bankruptcies) that led to his eventual removal. To my eternal shame, I only possess the non-Tyson version of the game. It wouldn’t matter anyway, because I’ve never beaten him, or Mr. Dream.

Actually, if we’re being double honest, I can’t seem to get past California’s Super Macho Man either. I can breeze through the rest of the game, even Bald Bull and Mr. Sandman get nowhere near me. But then Macho Man, his grey hair, his spin punches and his bouncing manboobs all conspire to send me to the canvas.

When that happens – and I love this – Super Mario comes in, having decided to take up a part-time job as a boxing ref for whatever reason, and gives me a short count to 10 before I’m declared KO’ed. If you think the friendly and affable Mario may be on your side for Punch-Out, forget it: he’ll give long count after long count to the opponent, and he always looks delighted when he takes the win away from you.

Tyson knew all about long counts against Buster Douglas – mind you, he knew a thing or two about earth-shattering uppercuts as well. If you should somehow manage to make it to Iron Mike, or more accurately if you search out the passcode that brings you to him immediately, then he’ll probably put you on your backside in seconds.

That’s because, for the first 90 seconds of the fight, you have to be perfect with your dodging – each and every punch he throws is an instant knockdown, as it probably would be for anyone in real life. I did tell you that Little Mac is about 40 centimetres tall. So it makes sense: if you threw your little nephew a haymaker uppercut designed to fell Goliath, then he’s not exactly going to stay on his feet, is he?

It’s alright though, because you’ve got Apollo Creed in your corner. No, sorry, that’s Doc Louis. A former heavyweight champ, it seems poor old Doc took a few too many blows to the head himself during the course of his mysterious career; when Mac is under the cosh and getting the larrups from Bald Bull, Doc patting you on the shoulder and telling you to join the Nintendo Fun Club isn’t exactly what you need to hear.

Still, stick with Doc and you’ll eventually triumph over the best fighters in the world. You made it kid, there’s you standing on top of the World Video Boxing Association, wearing all three belts, rival fighters and racist caricatures all dead at your feet, and even Mike Tyson paying you compliments.

One of the best games on the NES ends there, with no credits screen and certainly no apologies for the shocking racism and xenophobia that you’ve just witnessed. That’s the murky, seedy underbelly of professional sport for you - poor Ali, God rest him, must be doing the rope-a-dope in his grave.

22 May 2026

Mother 3 (2006)

It’s one of the most natural and dangerous human instincts we possess: we all want what we can’t have. And we PAL gamers ought to know this - after all, how else was I going to react to the news that Super Noah’s Ark 3D and Mahjong 64 wouldn’t be making it to Dublin? So wrapped up in my carnal desire for these games was I that I didn’t even know what an EarthBound was until I kept getting battered by some tubheaded kid called Ness in Super Smash Bros.

I later became acquainted with EarthBound, second game in the Mother series, and found it to be a game that would have to be described as pretty good, but not top notch. Soon, though, I became more than a little bit worried by the braying bloodhounds that worship that game, and the Mother series as a whole, as it’s called in Japan.

I can see why the fanbase were giving it so much vigour, though: there was another Mother game on the cards, and vocal shows of support directed at Nintendo seemed necessary, in order to get that mother out of Japan and into realms that wouldn’t understand half the jokes, references and Japanese-ness.

Mother 3 is a game that had been a long time coming, that’s for sure – about twelve years by my reckoning. We could have had it on the Super Nintendo (or more likely, the Japanese Super Famicom), the Nintendo 64 and even the very ill-fated Nintendo 64 Disk Drive, before development was finally restarted and the game released on the Game Boy Advance. What started, potentially, in 1994, took until 2006 to come out. Boy, that’s a lot of salaries and wasted profit potential, isn’t it?

Well, scaling down the game for the Game Boy Advance did give the game the unusual benefit of having the right graphics at the right time; rather than going for severely dated 3D graphics, as can be seen in the N64 trailers for Mother 3 (then called EarthBound 64 in western media), the final GBA version brings us some truly wonderful spritework, a lovely reminder of what lovingly crafted sprites can do.

It’s easiest to compare the battle system in this game to EarthBound. If you haven’t played that, go and play that first, or else we can compare the battle system to Dragon Quest instead. And if you haven’t played that either... well, alright, let me just give you the dope: there are no random encounters, and in fact you can see all enemies on the field before getting into a scrape with them.

Battle takes place in a first-person perspective, so you can take a good look at the enemies trying to crush you into dust - kitschy enemies such as the Forlorn Junk Heap, the Men’s Room Sign, the Artsy Ghost and the Gently Weeping Guitar. What’s really terrific is that every enemy has its own out-of-battle sprites as well, which must have took designer Shigesato Itoi and his graphical boys and girls a fair chunk of time. I commend the game for that.

The battling is your usual RPG stuff - equip weapons and armour for higher stats, and attack foes with physical blows or PSI, which is your somewhat limited array of magic. There’s not much in the way of customisation in battle - you just wail on your enemies until they bounce out of existence.

An ingenious quirk to the battle system keeps things interesting, though: if you keep tapping the attack button to the beat of the battle music, you can deliver more and more damage. It’s challenging, it’s fun and it offers great reward. It doesn’t make the battle system world class or anything, but at least it’s something that keeps you awake.

The plot of this game was designed to be ‘strange, funny and heartrending’, and it takes place over a number of different chapters, from the perspective of different characters too. In fact, it’s not until you heartrend your way to Chapter 4 that you assume permanent control of your main character Lucas - later to appear in a fair few Smash Bros games, and there’s no better endorsement for a character than that.

Mother 3 has got some great ideas, particularly watching the development of the world around you, and how malevolently designed technology starts to destroy nature. That’s always a relevant theme. But I find the story just a bit too goofy to really care about.

There’s a heartbreaker in the first chapter, true, years before the game’s main plot begins, and that really sets the tone. The two subsequent chapters set up a few more background details, and then the action switches to the present day as you traipse around odd event after odd event, until you finally go to pull seven needles out of the ground, which has some sort of world-shattering effect.

One thing we have to mention is that this game never did make it out of Japan, even after a hell of a lot of anxiety and aggravation on the part of the rabid fanbase I warned you about earlier. This was a problem, as the witty dialogue of Mother games is half the fun, and I sure as hell don’t speak Japanese. Have you ever tried to learn it? Lots of us nerds have, and most of us don’t get anywhere, ever.

So that means there were, and still remains, only two ways for me and the rest of the fans to play through Mother 3: one was to stumble through the main plot, not knowing the meaning of any of those funny little symbols, never realising that the character said something like “I’m sorry, Mike, but that’s called sexual harassment these days,” - basically the last thing you expect from game dialogue.

The other way of experiencing the game is through playing the fan translation, released late in 2008. This of course means ROMs and emulators and all that, but it’s the only way. The fan translation effort never fell victim to a cease-and-desist during its development either, despite Nintendo having knowledge of it, which is refreshing.

Two years, thousands of manhours, some very complex coding doohickery and 1,000 pages of dialogue to translate, that’s what it all took to bring Mother 3 to English-speaking fans. And that doesn’t even mention the dozens, maybe hundreds, of subtly nuanced jokes that the Mother series is famous for. Translation is one thing, but localisation is quite another.

The result of the online translation effort was a huge triumph, another glowing endorsement for the dedicated fanbase. Just think about that achievement. A group of fans actually contributing something useful beyond bluster, for once? And not only that, a group-effort fan translation that actually didn’t end with online drama, shady controversy, whiny meltdowns, strops and in-fighting? I wasn’t willing to believe it, but it happened, and it’s a credit to the guys in the charge – particularly led by a pro video game translator who goes by the online moniker Tomato.

Let’s face it, retro nerds like me tend to romanticise EarthBound (Mother 2 to our Japanese friends) but the truth is, that game is up against competition so stiff that it can’t really be called a top-tier game for the console. It definitely deserves a couple of playthroughs, and the fans adore it religiously, and good luck to them – Christ, I’d build a shrine to it too if I dropped a thousand dollars on a complete copy of it.

Mother 3 may have less competition on the GBA, if you can fairly dismiss the Final Fantasy ports and you do your best not to mention the Pokémon games. But is it the best RPG on the system? One of the finest RPGs of all? Not really. Despite some very poignant moments, the plot is a bit too disjointed and the final villains are hardly big twists.

The battle system is always fun, even for the rhythmically bewildered people like me. But there’s usually little strategy involved and it does get tiresome having to buff all of your party members three times, while debuffing the enemy thrice as well, for every single boss fight, and all just so that you don’t get bodied immediately. At least, that’s how it went for me.

Mother 3 is not a disappointing game, even an old grump like me wouldn’t go that far. But, and with my apologies to those who still campaign militantly for this game to come Stateside and beyond, the only way we’re ever, ever going to play this is via the fan-translated ROM. We must be realistic about that.

But do we really need this one to be localised and released? The spritework, the unique story and the fun battle system all offer good reasons to play through this one - once. And it’s a nice way to cap off the series, which now looks to be finished for good. But it just isn’t a top tier game.

15 May 2026

EarthBound (1995)

The Super Nintendo was strong on so many fronts: side-scrolling platformers, puzzle games, tournament fighters, action-adventures… but of course, if you lived in Europe you were deprived. Not just deprived of culture, and superb daytime television - Europeans had to get used to such things.

No, for a long time in the 90s (that’s last century, for any zoomers reading this), European console gamers had to do without a whole lot of RPGs, especially if you were a Nintendo kiddie. SNES players around the world got the chance to play story-driven games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Super Mario RPG, Lufia and Breath of Fire. Here in the UK and Ireland, we had Mortal Kombat and Super Tennis to keep us occupied.

So what, we probably said. Medieval monsters and swords and magic, so what? Menus and numbers and stats. Who needs all that, when you can use Sub-Zero to rip your opponents spine out of their body?

But 90s RPGs weren’t all maths homework, you know. And nor were they all ripoffs of Dungeons and Dragons. How about a role-playing game with bent town mayors, attacks from the works of Salvador Dali, many references to the Beatles, devices used specifically to get rid of steel pencil statues, baseball bats and Yo-Yos being used as weapons against big piles of puke, and sunstroke and homesickness being employed as negative status ailments?

What about an RPG where your protagonist forages hamburgers out of trashcans, and actual bathrooms get used by NPCs? Where critical hits are known as SMAAAASH attacks, with a beautifully satisfying sound effect? Where kooky secondary characters can call you up, and inform you of crucial updates on a special one-way phone that only receives calls?

Even from the very beginning of this game, when you’re asked to enter the name of your favourite food and favourite thing, when you notice the ATM Card in your inventory, when your faithful dog speaks to you and comes with you to a meteor site before taking fright and running back home, you realise that EarthBound is a very different game to anything you’ve ever played.

I first heard of EarthBound when Ness turned out to be the 12th and final character in Super Smash Bros for N64. In marked comparison to most of the other cast, he looked conspicuously normal. Bland, even. The question had to be asked: how come I never played that Nintendo game as a kid?

It turns out that EarthBound was a game that came out in the twilight years of the SNES in the USA and Japan. It received a huge marketing campaign from Nintendo to give it a jump start, with lots of advertisement and merchandise drummed up for it – even the game itself came packaged in a large, very eye-catching box.

There was no manual, either; instead, the game came with a massive strategy guide included, one that told you all you needed to know about the game, perhaps Nintendo’s way of helping the gamer through this strange new type of game.

But even with all this aid, sales of the game were pretty disappointing. It probably didn’t help that they used “This Game Stinks!” as the advertisement slogan, and went for gross-out 90s humour. Here I am, bemoaning my being an unenlightened European. But a huge majority of American gamers also missed this game at the time of its release.

A large box and strategy guide, eh? That’s right, and if you’re a collector who wants to buy this mother complete, you can prepare to have the guts sucked from your wallet. Fully boxed copies are only becoming rarer, and you can expect to pay over a thousand dollars for one. If you’re just after the cartridge, that’ll probably still run you over 300 bucks.

That’s too much money for me, naturally; I’m so impoverished that I’m forced to sleep under a duvet of NES cartridges to keep warm at night. Make no mistake though, this game has now become a religion of sorts, and Internet popularity from rabid fans spread the game’s influence every day of the week, and still to this day.

Many people now hold EarthBound up as a quirky icon of retro gaming, something bursting with nerd cred. Of course, the deadly sin for retro collectors is to assume that expensive games are automatically top notch. Say you had half your paycheck ready to drop on just the cartridge of EarthBound. Could this quaint lump of grey plastic really change your life?

Well, let’s see what the game’s really about. We’ve all witnessed ragtag bunches of swordsmen and mages go up against some evil magician or dragonlord in medieval RPGs. But the protagonist of EarthBound is a boy of about 13, living in what’s taken to be American suburbia. What kind of plot could they possibly rustle up for him and his similarly-aged eventual party members?

Why, intergalactic aliens, of course. Young Ness learns of Giygas, the universal cosmic destroyer, and how this evil entity has doomed humanity to eternal darkness. Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter like eternal darkness, you know what I mean?

Legends tell of three boys and a girl whose destiny it is to destroy Giygas – Ness, Paula, Jeff and Poo (quiet down the back, please). In order to do this, Ness must first fully understand his magical PSI powers.

And to do that, he’s got to travel to eight Sanctuary locations around the world of Eagleland and record short melodies onto a doodad called the Sound Stone. What follows is a crazy adventure of all kinds of small-time villains, where Giygas’ influence over the people of Eagleland becomes far-reaching and you’re not sure who to trust.

Time for a spiel on the battle system. Your typical screen-whooshing random encounters are gone, which is definitely a plus point. Aren’t random encounters such a poor idea? Here, you can see the enemy on the overworld map before the battle begins.

But you also have to watch where you’re going: get caught from behind, and the enemy will hit you with a surprise attack. Sneak up on them however, and you surprise them – or you may even defeat them without battling, if your level’s high enough. Now that’s a lot more like it.

EarthBound does need a bit of a grind at certain times (most notably at the beginning) to make sure your level and stats are high enough. And sometimes Lady Luck dictates that a battle will go badly wrong on you, necessitating frequent saves – but that’s no problem, it’s something RPG players are well used to. It’s quite reminiscent of Dragon Quest, the series it most emulates.

This is a meaty enough adventure as well, probably about 25-30 hours, and seeking out all of the wonderfully entertaining dialogue adds longevity. The game does lack in sidequests though, being rather linear, but that’s nothing unusual for the time.

And it’s true also that EarthBound’s rather simple graphics have copped some flak. Take Chrono Trigger, released only a few months later, and the difference in aesthetics is chalk and cheese, even for 1995. If you’re looking for graphical marvels, then you’re certainly in the wrong place here.

But why can’t EarthBound trade on its own style? The game does have its own tricks, even if people seem determined to overlook them. The sprites aren’t hugely expressive, but there’s a wide variety of them to cater to this game’s kooky cast of characters. One of the game’s most unique facets, though, and something that still looks impressive, is the psychedelic backgrounds of the ingame battles.

Of EarthBound’s many shining lights, one of its very brightest is the soundtrack. It’s one of those quirky soundtracks that wouldn’t really bear an awful lot of listening outside of the game. A lot of it isn’t catchy by itself. But it suits the game’s unique atmosphere perfectly while you’re playing, and there’s nothing quite like it.

There’s tons of tracks, too: at least ten distinct battle themes; unique themes for each of the towns and cities; a few different cave themes; and various other situational themes. Most of the tunes are whimsical and upbeat, with a few tense tracks and eerie themes towards the end, as the game’s happy mood takes a dive into terror.

Given its unsuccessful initial release, and its surge in popularity over the last, God, 20 years, it’s easy to romanticise EarthBound somewhat. In doing so, you run the risk of glossing over EarthBound’s slight faults. That’s understandable – after all, it has a uniqueness that most other games don’t match. Even its eventual sequel, Mother 3, didn’t manage to match EarthBound, in my view.

But, as it’s always been, you’ve got to take each game on its merits. EarthBound has a compelling setup, an immersive soundtrack, and I’m well prepared to give it a pass on its graphics. The battle system isn’t particularly complex, which can be good or bad depending on your view.

On the negative side, the difficulty ramps up quite a bit at the end of the game. The plot is sometimes disjointed, although the terrific characters and great dialogue make up for that. But it’s easy to overlook the parts of EarthBound where its legs become a little tired.

And rightly so, because this is a game that everyone should check out at least once, if even just because it’s alternative. One could never accuse this game of being generic. I couldn’t say that EarthBound has enough to be called a top-tier RPG, worthy of a place alongside the genre’s greatest. But it makes for a damn good second-string player.

8 May 2026

Princess Peach: Showtime! (2024)

The next time I feel my brow furrowing and my blood boiling at the next incomprehensible TikTok trend, or when I'm coming under social major fire because I haven't heard of some ultra-megapopular popstar, then I really must take a second just to remind myself that it's OK. It’s fine to admit that I am not a spring chicken, nor am I the target audience for this kind of thing anymore, if I ever really was.

TikTok and Taylor Swift and Labubu will all get on just fine without me and my support. I will just have to stick to what's appropriate for my age and gender. Which, depressingly soon for me, will be trainspotting, birdwatching and fishing.

I had come to terms with all of that. But I still had to wonder what I was doing when I started playing Princess Peach: Showtime for the Nintendo Switch. By this point in the Switch's lifetime, Nintendo were really running at full throttle. They couldn’t buy a hit during their Wii U run for love nor money, but no such problems during the Switch days.

Princess Peach Showtime is the kind of game that not particularly many people were asking for, so it was a moderate surprise when it was announced. But you just knew it would be pretty decent, and it was exactly the kind of experimental work that a company can make when all their other sales figures and metrics are sky-high.

I should have probably recognised ahead of time that any target audience for this game would be, well, female. And probably under the age of 12. Rather the polar opposite of me, in other words. But I'm drawn like a moth to a flame to any kind of Nintendo-published first party game, so why wouldn't I give Princess Peach Showtime a go?

And from a feminist perspective, it's a decent leap forward. This isn't the first time that Princess Peach has fronted a game, you know. She had her own title, Super Princess Peach, on the DS; another gaming system from Nintendo that sold like hot cakes. But that title didn't exactly scream girl power, being that it was the highly temperamental and changeable emotions of Princess Peach that powered much of the game's mechanics.

Here, in Princess Peach Showtime, there's no such inhibitions, limitations, or any other snide design choices that would seem to subtly suggest, "well, we all know a woman can't really do this stuff, but let’s just pretend". No, Princess Peach Showtime keeps it real - the princess of the realm attends a theatre show one night, only to find it all falling to pieces when she gets there.

That's the game’s story, mostly, but the key point is that this is not some title about having to go and rescue Mario, or any other sucker in the Mushroom Kingdom for that matter. This is a Princess Peach adventure on her own terms, she ain’t leeching off anyone else’s creative endeavours here. Every other character in the game is original, most of them being funny little ant-people who serve as the actors and extras for the theatre's stage productions.

The key gimmick for this game is that each level is centred around a costume change for the Princess. Critically for my own fragile male ego, this doesn’t mean that the game is relegated into being some kind of Princess Peach Dress-up Simulator. Well, you can go and make slight alterations to Peach's pink dress, as well as the accoutrement sported by her helper buddy Stella the Sparkle.

That’s definitely points in the game’s favour. I always love unlockable customisation options, and I’d be lying to you if I said that getting new dress patterns for Peach didn’t make me feel a bit like Waylon Smithers anytime a new Malibu Stacey came out.

But never mind the aesthetic stuff - each level brings about properly functional costumes, each of which changes the gameplay entirely. I won't list all of them, but they are fairly unique - you've got Cowgirl Peach, who romps through Old West settings, often on horseback. There's Detective Peach, who has to solve riddles and mysteries in lieu of actual platforming; there's Dashing Thief Peach, making us all wonder when a top-budget Carmen Sandiego game is gonna come out.

There's even a Patissiere Peach, where the one and only goal is making several cakes and cookies in accordance with the on-screen instructions. Probably the best costume change of the lot is Swordfighter Peach, which enables you to do some fencing with enemies, featuring some slick combat gameplay.

There are some problems here, though. Firstly, even though a game like this shouldn't be terrifically taxing - it's mostly just a 2.5D adventure, going from left to right - sometimes there are frame-drops, lag and generally it can be surprisingly unsmooth. That kind of thing doesn’t bother me greatly though, having grown up in the Nintendo 64 days.

But even if the game was running full speed at all times, you'll find that you can get through the bulk of the game in no time at all. Each of the levels may be about five minutes or more, but there are only a few level-types each - 3 Patissiere levels, 3 Ninja levels, 3 Mermaid levels, that sort of thing. Even at a discount, you mightn’t get too much of your money's worth.

Also, for whatever reason, possibly to bolster the replay value a bit and make the appeal of the levels last longer, it's one of those that’s quite annoying to complete with 100% of the goodies, namely collecting all of the Sparkle Gems in a level. Pretty much every level contains more than one point-of-no-return.

A lot of the time, you’ll only have one attempt at grabbing a particular Sparkle Gem as well. This inability to get up and quickly try again if you miss one, means you may have to repeat a particularly level half-a-dozen times before you can properly get everything.

I'm not saying this is a difficult game, far from it. Yet it's one of those games where you could get a bit bored, your mind may wander, your attention may lapse. And then you take a few too many hits, or you miss out on that split-second Sparkle Gem, and you sort of wonder if it's really worth it to get everything.

Again, we go back to the target audience thing, and I know that when I was 9 years old, princess-loving-little girl or not, I had absolutely no problem in trying some video game level 50 million times before I actually managed to do the business. For a bitter, jaded mid-thirties fool who wouldn't even know how to take a dress off, this is surely not the game for me. But that’s fine, really. I’ve always got my birdwatching and trainspotting.

10 April 2026

Pokémon Legends: Z-A (2025)

It has become a little bit fashionable and a little bit too easy to attack Paris for being the French city to end all French cities. It’s true that I have been to Paris, even attempted to speak a bit of French, parlay some of the old Fran-say, only to be met with English in response. But hasn’t everyone?

I at least knew enough not to accidentally find myself in a restaurant eating pigeon, frog’s legs, or even pigeon’s legs for that matter. And for whatever faults Paris has, at least it can always claim one thing - it ain’t London.

Pokémon Legends: Z-A sees us return to the Kalos region, specifically Lumiose City, the Pokémon version of Paris. Similar in nature to how the first Legends spin-off title, Legends Arceus, was something of a reimagining of the fourth Generation of Pokémon games in the region Sinnoh, Z-A brings us back to the world of the sixth Generation of Pokémon, originally featuring in Pokémon X and Pokémon Y for 3DS. Did you get all that?

Pokémon had been done in 3D before then, on the Nintendo 64, GameCube and Wii. If you really wanted to get into it, you could say that the fifth Generation of Pokémon, released late into the regular old DS’s life, had some 3D effects.

But the 3DS games are where the 3D Pokémon models first came to be in the mainline games, including the permanently-aloft Flying-type Pokémon, as well as the low effort animations that carried over to the Nintendo Switch era of Pokémon - a tiny little hop representing the Double Kick move, Bite attacks being animated with flying fists, and so on.

A few original sins committed in Kalos, then. But generally, the games were fine, just very easy to beat. Here’s an interesting one though - unlike its predecessor, Legends Z:A doesn’t take place in some sort of antiquated version of the Kalos region, before electricity and actual Pokéball technology came about. No, this is a present day rendering of the region, something like 5 years on from the timeline of when the original 3DS games released.

But here’s the even more interesting piece, not to mention the most divisive part of the whole game: the game is somewhat open-world, although open-city is really more accurate. You will be confined to one city for the entirety of your quest, a Pokémon pastiche of gay Paris, down to the landmark tower that is somehow visible from every window and horizon around.

You are wondering, “is there any way to leave the city, there must be, surely?” Actually, no. You are then wondering, “well, the city must be enormous, right?”... actually, no again on that one. You will be running around it quite a bit, but don’t expect it to take you a half-hour to get from one end of the game world to the other. You won’t be asking anyone “Où est la gare?”, let’s put it that way.

So where do you even catch Pokémon then? Well, there are designated Wild Zones all throughout Lumiose City. Simply step up, touch the translucent green barrier which repels even the strongest charging Pokémon and their attacks, and you will find yourself in parks, courtyards and clearings where wild Pokémon roam.

Typical, isn’t it? No sooner is there a bit of nice green space set up in your native city, than vicious dogs, birds and icebergs take up residence, ready to attack you at a moment’s notice.

Just like in Legends Arceus, it’s not just your Pokémon who may come under threat - some of the Pokémon, especially the large, red-eyed Alpha Pokémon, will come right after your player character and will knock you out if you ain’t careful. Paris and France in general does have good healthcare - and there are always Pokémon Centers just a brisk jog away - but it’s still no less spooky having the likes of Alpha Sharpedo chasing you down.

Coming back to the Kalos region does, fortunately, bring about a return of what is still Pokémon’s best gimmick: Mega Evolution. You can forget about your Gigantamaxes and your Terastallizing - Mega Evolution is where it’s at, giving old favourite Pokémon a breath of fresh air.

There are no outright new Pokémon added to the National Pokédex in this game, unlike Legends Arceus, but there are 27 new Mega Evolutions, for the likes of Gen 1 classics like Victreebel, Starmie and Dragonite, plus many other deserving Pokémon who didn’t get the Mega treatment the first time around. You will spend a bulk of the game’s story fighting Mega Evolved Pokémon who have gone rogue and need your help to calm them down again in fun, tense and somewhat janky battle situations.

Speaking of jank, and speaking also of collecting items in this supposed open-world, you won’t just be running around on the streets of not-Paris. You’ll be up on the rooftops as well, smashing enemy Arboks and Mareeps with Earthquakes - presumably the inhabitants in the buildings below just accept that they have to put up with the noise and property damage, if they want a Parisian postcode so badly.

You’ll be running parkour courses all around the city, going from rooftop-to-rooftop, collecting all kinds of loose items, TMs which teach your Pokémon new moves, and Colorful Screws that can be traded for permanent upgrades. Don’t be expecting parkour like Mirror’s Edge or Assassin’s Creed or anything - as I said, it’s janky - but it’s fun to explore. You won’t get loot fatigue in this one; you can while away hours just running after the next sparkle, and then the one after that.

The city does turn dodgy at night though, when the battlers come out. This is the other half of the game - once you’ve spent the day collecting Pokémon, loot and whatever else, you also have a Battle League to work your way through. The battle system has been overhauled to a more frantic, almost real-time system, which is pretty interesting and works well, even if it’s more of a button-masher.

You start the Battle League as quite literally a Z-lister, having to work your way up through the ranks, one letter at a time. It would have been fun to do this all the way, a proper journey to the top. However, early on in the game you get bumped up to Rank F, though at least the plot becomes meatier from there.

It’s a little bit like the old Gym Leader Battles in the regular mainline games, get through 8 more of them against major characters, and you become the top dog. There is online battling and online trading as well, some of which is actually necessary if you want to get everything possible.

In the end, the game is typical Pokémon fare of the last 10 or so years - quite fun, very enjoyable, but pretty lacking in ambition and amazement, and it’ll probably get a bit old before you do everything.

Loads of nonsense dialogue to sift through once again, not a hint of voice acting, with the same old graphics, and a Pokédex smaller even than that of Legends Arceus. That is unless you purchase a €30 threadbare DLC which was advertised before the game even released, to which anyone with sense would adopt a snooty French accent and exclaim: “non!”.

By the end, you’re left having had fun, but bemoaning the developers’ laziness and attitude. Picture the fanciest French chef west of Alsace, capable of making the finest Lièvre à la Royale, instead eschewing all his skills and slopping up the greasiest, most gut-rotting cheeseburgers known to man. Fine if he wants to do it his way, and still tasty, no doubt. Mais quel dommage…

3 April 2026

Dragon Quest II: Luminaries of the Legendary Line (1990)

I see that someone thousands of miles away from me has won the EuroMillions. A hundred million quid, if you don’t mind. That lucky sod. They’ll probably end up being unnecessarily frugal with it too. Or worse than that, they won’t even give up their job.

Can you believe how many people say that they’d keep working if they scooped the big prize? Well, it’s easy to look all noble and hard-working by saying that, but talk is pretty cheap, isn’t it? Especially after you’ve won yourself a nine-figure bank account.

Even if you were a diligent little worker, happy to slave away at your desk for the rest of your young life (and in that case, why would you even play the lotto?), you cannot tell me that you’d hang on to your job just to have “something to do.”

The first little bit of nonsense that comes your way, whether that’s a snotty email or a pilchard colleague or a broken piece of software or a manager with no understanding, you’d be straight out that door. No ifs, no buts. The only thing uncertain is whether or not you decide to defecate on your boss’s desk before you say sayonara to your impoverished colleagues for the very last time.

We sometimes do a group Euromillions punt in work, I suppose you’d have to call it a syndicate although that puts us a bit uncomfortably close to being labelled as a crime organisation. I think the most we’ve ever won by doing this is €16, which would go on to be immediately reinvested, by which I mean immediately wasted.

I decided to be all boring and awkward and drop out of the syndicate altogether, although even saving this extra fiver per week hasn’t been a comfortable experience for me. After all, what if they bag a massive win and I’m the only one not part of it? I know, I know, they could be playing until the heat death of the sun and still not win the big prize. But still, what if they do?

I remember one of the first times I didn’t join in with them was a Friday before a Public Holiday Monday. It turned out that a not-insignificant amount of money, a few hundred thousand, had been won in a “Dublin newsagent”.

I was sweating bullets, constantly refreshing the news, just in case that was the ticket I could have been a part of. The odds of this were millimetric really, but you still get that primal fear. But since my colleagues all showed up for work again on Tuesday, they must not have won anything, unless they were terrific liars.

And as mean-spirited as it is, I was secretly thrilled. I’d have never heard the end of it. I would’ve missed out on about seventy grand – very tasty, perhaps not strong enough to finance gangland drug wars or whatever other hobby I would want to take up. But imagine I had missed out on the top prize?

Although I’d still moan about winning 70 million Euro, only to watch it being split seven ways. A mere ten million will not pay for both my castle and my yacht, you know. So I’d have to win the lottery again, on my own. What’s the odds on two major lottery wins?

Does buying two tickets double my chances of winning? Does buying a million tickets guarantee it? I can’t see why not. You have to spend money to make money, that’s what the richies tell us. You’d be a fool to defy them.

After getting that second lotto win, what do you do? I’ve told you before that I’d immediately buy a European castle. But what then? Could having millions really become passé? Would there be any fun in gambling again? Perhaps I could move towards being a professional gambler, and blow all my winnings just as quickly as I’d won them? A fool and his money is some party, or so they say.

Make no mistake, the lottery is a hell of a compelling ‘draw’, to give you a little lotto pun there. And having the lottery as a new minigame provided just one of the many, much-needed innovations for the first Dragon Quest sequel. The original DQ game wrote the book on JRPGs, while the third DQ game was one of the biggest releases of all time, at least in Japan.

So how would Dragon Quest II, the middle child, fare? Well, in a nutshell, DQ2 is certainly more expansive than the first game, but its still bite-sized nature and improvements make it a far more palatable prospect to play. Forgive the alliteration – from this title onwards, each Dragon Quest game has been subtitled with a wild alliterative title. In this game’s case, it’s Dragon Quest II: Luminaries of the Legendary Line.

You’ll still want a guide all the way through this one of course, and save states as standard – you must never let yourself fall victim to enemy hoards, because remember, getting killed in battle means you lose half your gold, which is your most precious resource.

Designer Yuji Horii does this on purpose, as a fervent follower of fanciful flutters (that’s enough alliteration). He’s a big gambler, and he wants to make you think about the gamble of pressing forward into difficult caves and dungeons, at the risk of potentially losing half your money.

So using save-states and rewinds might spoil this fun somewhat. But what kind of a fool wouldn’t rig the gambling odds in their own favour if they could? You can also access a basic lottery game in DQ2 and cheat likewise. This will help you net yourself a vital Gold Card for discounts at shops, cutting your grinding time significantly – finally, a bit of customer appreciation. Don’t think of it as cheating, think of it as evening the odds.

And at least you’ve got other compadres to pick you up if you fall, because you now lead a party of not just one, but three blank slates. Yes, the grind still exists but at least you’re not a lone potato out there. Still, that does also mean you’ll be up against multiple enemies at once in the random encounters here, rather than just one at a time. This is actually a step-up from the first game, if you can believe that.

These days, you can play this game fully remade in HD-2D on modern consoles, along with the first game. It adds a lot to the original experience, including a new party member. Though, in keeping with my status as an ex-syndicate member, I played Dragon Quest II by dodgy means – the Super Famicom fan-translation of the game. This port, naturally, has nice updated music and graphics from the NES original, and it’s a tad easier.

And it matters greatly which Dragon Quest versions you play, let me tell you. Will you go MSX, SNES, SFC, NS, DS, 3DS, PS4, PS5? Trust me, this stuff is like knowing which fork goes with your lobster. Or after you’ve won the lotto, which key goes with your cocaine.

Talk about gambling, towards the end of the game you might as well put your faith in the good old three-legged rocking horse, the Sad Ken of the fold, because your chance of success become infinitesimal. The designers readily admit that they didn’t properly playtest the game’s last couple of dungeons as they simply didn’t have time, and it shows.

The odds are massively against you, and just like the first game you’re gonna want to be save-stating after every battle in case you lose some progress towards the Blaessed Staff of Anorakia or whatever item is on offer. It’s still a bit like DQ1 in that a battle can turn against you on a dime if you shall be that unlucky.

You can grind your characters down to the bone, get them the very best equipment, perfectly execute what threadbare strategy there is, but still lose everything if the computer decides it hates you. And gosh, it decides that often.

There was one instance where an enemy mob ambushed us, and killed both themselves and all three of us before we could move. Now, in video games, I always set the text speed to its Fastest, which in DQ2 means messages will fire at you like an automatic rifle.

Well, split-seconds into this particular battle, I was told that we’d all died and jolly bad luck, old chap, that’ll be half your gold and it’s back to a faraway inn for you. It must have been the quickest battle in RPG history. Quicker even than the instant win battles in EarthBound. Quite simply, I was speechless.

So is a guide advisable, then? Forget advisable, you’d be a fool not to. This is a game so esoteric and obtuse that I might as well be playing it in its original Japanese for all the sense it made to me. I’d have a better chance at reading my cat’s mind. “If you don’t know, then I’m not going to tell you,” that sort of thing.

Certainly the villagers won’t tell you. Vague hints maybe, but never “search this exact, nondescript spot in the corner of a tiny room for an invisible item that is literally the key to you winning the game” – they won’t help you out with that one, no matter what translation you play.

The Dragon Quest series would vastly improve as it went on, and if you’re desperate, or just desperately geeky, you can still get into Dragon Quest II – just about. And certainly the HD-2D remake is the way to go here. But beating this game the old-school way, without the aid of save states, the most handholdy walkthrough you can find and more than a few hours grinding? You’ll have a better chance at winning the lotto.

20 February 2026