Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, Team Ninja’s latest crack at the long-dormant Ultimate Alliance series, is far from a perfect game. Still, the game as a whole just works, and not merely in the sense that its mechanics and systems function as intended; everything comes together conceptually, with the tone of the story and art style perfectly matching the chaotic ebullience of the gameplay. The game combines basic brawler systems with a cartoonish presentation and doesn’t try to be much more than that. Simply put, the game knows what it is and stays true to itself at all times.

Welcome back to Punished Notes, where I (occasionally) release all of my blandest and most anodyne takes on the world of video games. This week, we’ll be looking at some of my favorite user-created stages in Super Mario Maker 2, why I can’t get into a recent game everyone adores, and how I got emotional over a movie trailer after three seconds.

If you’d like to make your very own Breath of the Wild-inspired mushroom risotto, then try our recipe! It’s got more steps than throwing things in a wok, but this one sure is tasty.

Nintendo is widely known for its deep well of beloved franchises. Here are six in particular I would absolutely love to see on Switch.

When The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild took the gaming world by storm two years ago, it amazed players with its massive open world, improved traversal mechanics, weapon variety, and breathtaking scenery. … After playing Cadence of Hyrule, the latest Zelda spin-off, which uses the mechanics of Crypt of the Necrodancer, I now realize what was missing: the integration of music as a core gameplay mechanic (Kass doesn’t count).

E3 2019 is officially over, y’all. Though the world’s biggest gaming expo came and went faster than Elon Musk swiping that 2B artwork, the conference left us with plenty in the way of announcements to dissect and games to fawn over. As with our pre-E3 2019 coverage a few weeks back, your favorite panel of dream chasers — David Silbert, Sam Martinelli, and Kei Isobe — will be doing a rapid-fire post-mortem on the best and worse of this year’s show. Easy peasy, Keanu Reevesy?