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But can it emulate Tennis for Two? (These guys did it...)

[...] had a version that had been rewritten for modern machines and even network play.

http://gamersquarter.com/tennisfortwo/

Haha disregard that, that one is just perfect. Tim's reviews of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Mother 2 blew my mind. After reading those, I gave up mainstream game media altogether.

In this corner of the net a lot of people have been experimenting with alternative game review forms for a long time. Some fun sites for starters are:

• selectbutton forums
• insertcredit news, of which I'm a humble very occasional contributor
• gamer's quarter magazine, which I reviewed in a vaguely gamer's quarter style here
• actionbutton reviews

Like what you see? Are you into literary criticism? Do you spend more time talking about videogames than playing them? Join us in the pretentious side! We got doujin games! Pongism is the truth!

Haha disregard that, that one is just perfect. Tim's reviews of Metal Gear Solid 2 and Mother 2 blew my mind. After reading those, I gave up mainstream game media altogether.

In this corner of the net a lot of people have been experimenting with alternative game review forms for a long time. Some fun sites for starters are:

• selectbutton forums
• insertcredit news, of which I'm a humble very occasional contributor
• gamer's quarter magazine, which I reviewed in a vaguely gamer's quarter style here
• actionbutton reviews

Like what you see? Are you into literary criticism? Do you spend more time talking about videogames than playing them? Join us in the pretentious side! We got doujin games! Pongism is the truth!

If you can read The Escapist and The Gamer's Quarter , and get cheats and strategies at GameFAQs , all of that for free... what's the point? Printed mags cost money, usually lack depth, and may suffer an influence of ad-buyers in their ratings.

At least with Diehard Gamefan you knew what was their bias -- they were also an import store, of course they'd praise some Japan-only stuff... too bad they were usually right, I still wonder who's the idiot at Sega who thought a masterpiece like Monster World IV wasn't worth localizing!

Even though the 3D games are lovely and well designed and feature expansive worlds, too often its obvious that these aren't worlds, they're carefully designed levels, sculpted hand in hand with the powerups made available.

Fully agree on that one, its one of the things that extremly dissapointed me in the 3D Metroids, while most of the 2D one weren't much better in that regart, its a lot easier to suspend disbelieve in 2D then it is in 3D. Prime always felt like Theme Park ride, not like an alien world, it lacked any substance and realism, no freedom, respawing enemies, forced level structure (no opening of that door unless you shoot with a wave beam against it...) and other annoyances.

The first Metroid on the other side was freedom in all its brutality, the player was dropped into an alien world and that was it, no map, no hand holding, no nothing, just you and a world full of non-friendly enemies. I would really wish that Nintendo would do a Metroid game in the sprit of the first one again, something that focuses on a realistic apearing alien world and challanges that can be conquered in creative ways, something that feels like really being there and less like a typical Nintendo game. Maybe something like an outerspace OperationFlashpoint, were you simply get your mission goal and thats pretty much it, how you reach that goal is fully up to you and not limited by forced level structure.

The Gamer's Quarter, issue 4 had a pretty good article on what changed from the first Metroid to the later ones.

While it wasn't the first time this has been covered The Gamer's Quarter had a longer, more in-depth article about the previously released Shadowrun games back in issue #5. Sure it didn't include anything about the crappy-sounding Microsoft title, but then again... who really cares about it?

http://www.gamersquarter.com/tennisfortwo/ might be interesting to you.

These days I only read Gamer's Quarter and The Escapist for well-written in-depth nostalgia, and a bunch of gaming message boards for the news.

I'm not a big fan of realistic flight combat games.

A video game is never going to have the stakes (your life) that real combat has, nor the months of flight training. So it makes sense to distill a game into the "interesting bits"

Interestingly Gamers Quarter #2 had a review of Steel Battalion that seems to indicate it's taking this approach; about as "hard sci fi" as you can get, with that giant dashboard accesory, and then heightening it by having "real character death"... you can't restore if you get killed (and don't yank the memory...)