Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 3 Comments

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (SNES): Shoots for the Moon, Lands Among the Stars (Detailed Review)

Super Mario RPG | Bowyer

Super Mario RPG is a game that, when it was originally released, likely met with a lot of skepticism. Squaresoft’s RPGs are generally known as their huge sweeping tales that were not like anything that most gamers have seen at the time. Mario games, on the other hand, generally had no story beyond the typical excuse plot involving rescuing the princess. I can imagine the surprise when the two ended up going together like peanut butter and chocolate.

Since then, there have been two sub series that have been considered spiritual successors to Super Mario RPG; those being the Paper Mario series, and the Mario & Luigi series. Super Mario RPG was also one of the last games released for the Super Nintendo in 1996 and was the last game Squaresoft developed for a Nintendo system until Final Fantasy Tactics Advance in 2003. Super Mario RPG was the source of many technical achievements and innovations for the time of its release, but the real question is if it is as impressive today as it was in 1996. Read more

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 2 Comments

Standard Review: Duck Season (PC)

Duck Season | Header

I have a strange fascination with the “meta-horror” sub genre as of late. It is one thing to scare the player by having big freaky monsters jump out at them from behind the bushes and go “OOGEDY BOOGEDY BOOGOLY, but it’s another to use the player’s connection to something from their childhood turning fucked up to hit them on a personal level. It is because of this that I spent more time than justified reading those stupid gaming creepypastas that were about as scary as Donald Trump trying to walk up a flight of stairs without complaining.

I have already covered a fair few games based around this sort of premise, and despite the fact that it isn’t exactly something that’s never been done before, I do find that there is enough unique variance that makes me want to check all of these out. Duck Season is the most recent of these that I have tried out, and it was definitely something. Read more

Posted on by Annie Gallagher

The Weekly Bern (7/4/2020): Kentucky & Colorado Senate Defeats, Let’s Hope New Jersey is Different.

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Welp, today (as in the June 30th 2020 when this was being written) was a fucking mess. We wake up to see that Charles Booker lost by a slim margin to Amy McGrath, and later on we see that Frackenlooper has a 20 point lead over Andrew Romanoff in Colorado’s Senate race. This is a feeling all too familiar to those of us that got our hopes up that the DNC wouldn’t fuck us over again in the Presidential race, but these races are yet another painful reminder of how much the odds are stacked in the establishment’s favor.

That being said, the fact that Charles Booker gained this much momentum in a state as red as Kentucky despite being dwarfed in fundraising by Amy McGrath shows how much of an impact we are making, and that this could happen again. The only problem is that most people don’t even know these progressives exist until someone like Bernie Sanders or AOC endorses them, and it makes things all the more frustrating that they didn’t endorse Andrew Romanoff in a race that could have pushed him over the edge and won. Read more

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 3 Comments

The Weekly Bern (6/26/2020): Bowman & Jones Win Primary, Booker Leading McGrath, Can Romanoff Win too?

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Weekly Bern and NO MORE ELIOT ENGEL, FUCK YEAH MOTHERFUCKERS!!!! So yeah, you’ve probably heard by now about the enormous victories in the New York Primary. Not only did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez win re-election in a landslide against her Wall Street pandering opponent, which will undoubtedly lead to a lot of conservative tears when they find out that AOC survived re-election and President Pussygrabber didn’t… she won in a landslide! This of course came as no surprise to anyone except for the aforementioned right wing goons and detached Wall Street oligarchs, but it feels so good to give those fuckers a taste of their own medicine. Read more

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 3 Comments

Dragon Quest III: The Seeds of Salvation (NES/SNES/GBC/Ios/3DS/PS4/Switch): A JRPG Legend

Dragon Quest III | Box art

A lot of us who live outside of Japan don’t realize just how important the Dragon Quest series is to gaming. So many of us are bound to have at least one JRPG among our favorites of all time, yet ultimately aren’t familiar with the series that put this genre on the map. I’ve often thought of what it must be like to discuss the differences in gaming culture with a gamer from Japan, about the differences in popularity and what games that we never got in our respective countries.

Dragon Quest III is to the Dragon Quest series what Final Fantasy VII is to the Final Fantasy series. It’s the one that damn near every thinks of when they hear the name of the series. I finally got the chance to play through Dragon Quest III for myself a few months ago through its Switch port, and even thirty years after its release, it still kicks some serious ass! Read more

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 3 Comments

The Weekly Bern (6/14/2020): Paula Jean Swearengin Wins Primary, Charles Booker & Jamaal Bowman Surging.

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As predicted, we did in fact see some more progressive victories in the June 9th primaries, and most of them were in West Virginia. While Stephen Smith did not manage the nomination, several West Virginia Can’t Wait candidates still have, including Senate candidate Paula Jean Swearengin. While Paula Jean’s nomination is a pretty big victory in and of itself when compared to the defeats of Erica Smith and Kimberly Graham earlier this year, it should be noted that she was not the only West Virginia Can’t Wait candidate to win her primary.

All three of three House nominees not only are part of the West Virginia Can’t Wait movement, but have each signed on to the People’s Platform, a collection of 30+ progressive plans and policy positions, some of which include the legalization of cannabis, a freedom dividend, and publicly funded college tuition. This is in addition to three State Senate candidates and 11 State Assembly candidates that have also advanced to their respective general elections. Read more

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 2 Comments

Bravely Default (3DS): Many Will Play, Few Will Finish (Detailed Review)

Bravely Default | battle

Ever since I knew of Bravely Default’s existence, I was hyped up for it. Just about everything I saw was a sign that pointed to this being an amazing game. First of all, it being a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light was a good sign seeing as how I found that to be one of the more underrated games in the Final Fantasy series. 4 Heroes of Light was a game I greatly enjoyed just due to how it managed to easily capture the feelings of Final Fantasy I-III while improving on their mechanics and presentation. Many have criticized it for being unpolished or overly difficult, but that was not correct. The game, despite not being easy in any sense, was well balanced enough due to how much more accessible and convenient the game’s job system was than previous games like Final Fantasy V. Yet what was probably the most memorable aspect of 4 Heroes of Light was its simplicity. Read more

Posted on by Annie Gallagher · 5 Comments

The Weekly Bern (6/5/2020): June 9th Elections

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The June 6th Primaries went significantly better than I expected. I’m not going to say that they were excellent or anything given that, as with the past few primaries, a lot of progressive challengers got squashed. Kimberly Graham and Mckayla Wilkes both performed way below expectations, and the only major winners in congressional races, with exception of Teresa Legar Fernandez, were those running unoppossed or for the nomination in red states where all the odds are stacked against them in the general.

But there are some good things to come out of this recent election, the one that you’ve most likely heard of being that insane bigoted scumbag Steve King lost his primary. While the current Republican nominee for his district is only a slight improvement over King and will undoubtedly vote the same way, it means that we have one less wannabe fascist in DC, and simply being rid of him will mean a lot. That being said, it now means that it’s going to be harder for progressive Democrat J.D. Scholten to flip this seat, but if his fundraising numbers are any indication, it may not be impossible. Read more