30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 2016

Here we are at the end, my friends. Last year’s game was something of a downer, but you know what they say: it’s always darkest before the dawn. And the dawn that’s about to break — it’s a bright one. You know how much I love Metroid despite being less than thrilled with the most recent entries, and that for a long time the series has sat dormant with the ugly stain of Other M as the last official game to its name. Well, while Nintendo has been dropping the occasional terrible Metroid game or ignoring the series for long periods of time, fans

30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 2002

If you know me or digitaleidoscope at all, you may be surprised that not a single Metroid game has appeared on this list yet. Metroid is my favorite videogame franchise, and by the 2000s a good portion of the series was already released. The first game hit in 1986, followed by Metroid II in 1991 and what most people would consider Metroid’s peak, Super Metroid, in 1994. Truth is that I almost completely missed out on all the Metroid games during my childhood, and didn’t get into the series until Other M was already on the horizon. An old friend finally convinced me around 2010 that

30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1987

I was born in November of 1987. I opened my eyes on a world where Star Trek: The Next Generation had just premiered. RoboCop, Predator, and Spaceballs were brand-spanking-new. The Princess Bride was still in theaters. And the Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania franchises had all debuted their first installment in the US within just the last few months. What I’m saying is that 1987 was a magical time for a nerd like me, even if I wasn’t old enough yet to know it — old enough to watch TV, play videogames, or… to lift my own dumb head, actually. To me though, 1987 is,

A Diehard Metroid Fan Defends Federation Force

Well, the Metroid news has dropped… and Nintendo fans aren’t pleased. The trailer was lumped in with a bunch of other short 3DS teases, but there’s no denying it — we’re getting a new Metroid game. The real shocker is that despite hints from Nintendo, and even from Miyamoto himself, that we’d maybe be seeing both a classic siderscrolling Metroid and a Metroid Prime-style game released in the near future, Federation Force isn’t either of those; not really. Metroid Prime: Federation Force uses the perspective of Metroid Prime, but it looks to be a squad-based multiplayer shooter with an oddly cartoony art

High Heels and Hard Light: Sexism, Pandering, and the Fall of Samus Aran

Samus Aran. Badass bounty hunter. Galactic savior. Hero and protagonist of a videogame series that has endured for almost thirty years. Samus Aran is among the most iconic videogame characters of all time. As far as female protagonists go, Samus is the earliest surviving one. Aside, I guess, from Ms. Pac-Man, but can you really count an anthropomorphized yellow blob? Samus is — at the very least — the oldest surviving female protagonist we can identify with. You know, since she’s human. Or at least humanoid. Back in 1986, even if you owned the original Metroid, even if you’d beaten

What If… (Videogames, Star Wars, and the Power of Fanon)

I remember being read a story when I was a kid. Nothing about the plot or the characters — what I remember is the ending, and it’s stuck with me for something like two decades. The story ended… by not ending. Not just by leaving questions unanswered or threads untied, but literally telling the reader, “Now you come up with your own ending!” You might laugh if I say that to me it was a moment of profound frustration, disappointment — even betrayal. But it was. I can still remember how disturbing it was to me and how lost I

The Beauty of the Glitch

My video card has always been finicky. Mostly just the occasional, barely-noticeable pink lines dancing in the title bars of windows. (I had to look up what that very top bit of a window is called.) A little unnerving, but nothing serious. It served me admirably for years, despite being a touch eccentric. We were a good fit. I can appreciate eccentric. Last weekend, though, it took things to a whole new level. Where we’d had minor glitches before, we were now in full-blown catastrophic failure territory. The problem began with Borderlands 2, which froze up with garbled graphics and