The Anatomy of Super Castlevania IV | III | Stable condition

There’s a lot of ground to cover in stage one of Super Castlevania IV—literally. This opening level sprawls even further, and introduces more game mechanics, than even the massive first stage of Castlevania III. Many of the tricks and lessons it teaches cover the same ground as the previous game, as we’ll see here in […]

The Anatomy of Super Castlevania IV | II | Theme of Simon

The Anatomy of 16-Bit Castlevania: Phase One | Super Castlevania IV Once you pass through the castle gates, you really get a sense of what Konami was trying to bring to the table with Castlevania on this newer, more powerful hardware. You don’t immediately face a threat upon reaching the castle grounds, but everything seems… livelier. A […]

The Anatomy of Super Castlevania IV | I | The bloodletting

The Anatomy of 16-Bit Castlevania: Phase One | Super Castlevania IV Dracula is dead! Long live… Dracula!? It’s true: You can’t keep a good villain down. Or a good franchise. Especially when that franchise’s thin excuse for a plot revolves entirely around a specific villain. 1991’s Super Castlevania IV saw Konami extending its popular NES trilogy […]

The Anatomy of Metroid Fusion | 17 | …and the Omega

Friends, meet Samus Aran. She got the band back together. With Ridley-X defeated, Samus is basically back at full fighting strength — the one absence from her arsenal of goodies being the Ice Beam, which remains somehow impossible for her to use because… metroids? Science? It’s never really explained, since she can use ice-powered missiles that send […]

The Anatomy of Metroid Fusion | 15 | Round two

Even after linking up again with Adam, and despite the continued linearity of this section of the game, Fusion continues to allow you to feel like you’re basically free-wheeling. It manages to hit the same sweet spot that certain parts of Super Metroid did, giving you a nudge toward your objectives but leaving you to sort […]

The Anatomy of Metroid Fusion | 14 | Ahh, memories

With the Gravity Suit in hand (not literally), unsurprisingly the next phase of the game takes you back to all the underwater areas you couldn’t proper explore last time. This comes much later in the game than Maridia did in Super Metroid, where you acquired the Gravity Suit at the midpoint. Here, you have only a […]

The Anatomy of Metroid Fusion | 13 | Bad dreams

A few housekeeping notes following up on the previous entry. First, I forgot (or maybe never realized) that you can temporarily freeze the SA-X to give yourself a moment’s respite during the big chase scene. This doesn’t do that much to help, but some help is better than none whatsoever in such a deadly sequence. […]

The Anatomy of Metroid Fusion | 12 | Twisted mettle

When last we left Samus, she was dying horribly at her own hands. This latest encounter with SA-X is a particularly difficult one for a few reasons. For starters, it happens in the midst of the sector’s power outage; while you need to restore basic power to reach this point, that’s amounts to a save point and door […]

The Anatomy of Metroid Fusion | 10 | Porno for PYR

I always like to see developers making conscious, and conscientious, use of their selected platform. For example, here we have the real path to Sector 5’s objective tucked behind a hidden block that offers a small, discreet visual cue at the very right edge of the screen. This is something that wouldn’t really have worked in console Metroid games […]

The Anatomy of Bionic Commando | 14 | Heil THIS

This is the end, beautiful friend. All that swinging around like a loon and collecting bullets from the corpses of defeated foes in order to incorporate the strength of the dead into your own essence leads to this: Area 12, the Empire’s headquarters. A below-ground concrete bunker surrounded by concertina wire and fascist emblems. Area 12 […]

The Anatomy of Bionic Commando | 13 | Top secret

Area 11 is as colorful and bright as Area 10 was dim; rather than the Empire’s sewers, this appears to be its furnace. You’ll meet a few human enemies here, but the real challenge comes from the need to perform non-stop advanced grappling in order to proceed. For instance, the level begins with a moving platform, which you […]

The Anatomy of Bionic Commando | 11 | No more another castle

Bionic Commando doesn’t want you to rescue a princess or a damsel in distress; instead, the plot revolves around saving some old guy from captivity. This was clearly a game designed when ’80s action movie stars were still in their prime. The glass ceiling of viable heroism hadn’t begun to shift upward to accommodate the entire […]