How Donkey Kong Country Crafts a Foreboding Tale of the Unknown Donkey Kong Country is among the finest 2D platformers ever and one of the best-looking and best-controlling games of its time. On the narrative…
Author: Sam Martinelli
Sam Martinelli
Sam has been playing video games since his earliest years and has been writing about them since 2016. He’s a big fan of Nintendo games and complaining about The Last of Us Part II. You either agree wholeheartedly with his opinions or despise them. There is no in between. A lifelong New Yorker, Sam views gaming as far more than a silly little pastime, and hopes though critical analysis and in-depth reviews to better understand the medium's artistic merit. Twitter: @sam_martinelli.
Climbing the Mountain Within You Minutes into my first playthrough of Celeste, I found myself breathing more heavily than usual. The 2D platformer certainly presented some light challenge early on, but that wasn’t what was…
Putting Old Classics Under the Modern Microscope Though video gaming as a medium is still relatively nascent, enough time has passed since the original Pong that we as gamers have begun to set aside many…
The most jarring scenes in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Bethesda’s latest Nazi-shooting sim, occur not during bloody firefights, brutal executions, or in the midst of a completely obliterated New York City. They occur in…
Greats That Didn’t Quite Make The Cut As the name of this very website suggests, gamers often struggle to keep up with their extended backlog of quality video games. Sometimes, you just decide that, for…
A Classic Or a Failure? While I haven’t written very many video game reviews, I could probably take any game I’ve ever played and assign it some kind of rating out of ten. Breath of…
Revisiting One of Mario’s Greatest Adventures Everyone is enjoying Mario’s latest excursion (you can read David Silbert’s excellent Super Mario Odyssey review here), and they should be! Super Mario Odyssey is a marvel in open-world…
A Cartoon Golf RPG Stands Out From The Pack Over the years, I’ve become largely disillusioned by big budget “AAA” video games, despite their rapid and impressive advancements in recent years. Every time I see…