Words On Wednesday

“ Astalon: Tears of the Earth ” is a retro-styled Metroidvania released in 2021. Pixel art is big now, especially with so many indie studios and developers wanting to create games without spending tons of time and money on generating art assets. Plus, the Metroidvania genre is experiencing something of a resurgence lately. With that perfect storm, there are a lot of games LIKE Astalon. What makes Astalon special? Is it worth your attention? I didn’t necessarily come across Astalon by accident, but I certainly wasn’t seeking it out in particular. I had just come off a 100+ hour Skyrim run and needed a palette cleanser game. Metroidvania games in general are some of my favorites, and they’re frequently very short. That makes them perfect between longer and more invested games. With tons of new Metroidvania games out in the past few years, I started looking around for good options in the genre. Lately, I’ve tried to start shifting more of my gaming to PC, but my Surface Pro 7 isn’t very ...

“Castlevania: Curse of Darkness” is a 3D action RPG released on the PS2 and Xbox in 2005. Early 3D games in the Castlevania series existed in a very weird space; they were trying to blaze a trail from a traditionally 2D genre into a third dimension, but 3D models were still fairly low resolution and the controls were often clunky. As such, Curse of Darkness is cursed (pun intended) with this sort of video game adolescence, where earlier games excelled with 2D sprites and traditional mechanics, and later games did something similar but better. However, does that mean that Curse of Darkness offers nothing worth playing today? My experience with Curse of Darkness began soon after it released on PS2. At a time when rentals were expensive and demos only existed for popular titles on quarterly demo discs, you basically had to make a decision off pictures from magazines and familiarity with the series. I played and enjoyed Castlevania games in the past, so it was a reasonably safe bet. Althou...

The crown jewels of literature on The Legend of Zelda include “Hyrule Historia,” “Art & Artifacts,” and “Encyclopedia.” The “Goddess Trilogy” as they are called together, these three books are dense packages of lore, artwork, interviews, and nearly anything you could want to see about everyone’s favorite Hylian Link and his entourage. I picked up a copy of Hyrule Historia for my cousin as a Christmas present the year it came out. As much as I like Zelda, he has a tattoo of Link holding the triforce, so I can’t really compete with that. Soon after, I got a copy for myself. Just because he gets the first copy doesn’t mean I’m leaving myself out. As a Zelda fan, I would be remiss if I DIDN’T own a copy. The biggest draw of Hyrule Historia when it first came out was the official timeline. Zelda games are notorious for being tentatively related to each other, but not exactly sequels. There were numerous fan discussions about what order the games came in, but nothing from Nintendo to con...