Shmup. Some gamers get a natural high just from saying the word while others can’t forget about the genre fast enough. Despite this, one thing’s for certain: shmup’s legacy will endure as long as there are video games to be played.

At their best, Nintendo games bridge generations. “Super Mario Bros.”, “The Legend of Zelda”, “Metroid”, “Donkey Kong”—these games, and the colorful cast of characters that populate them, have made appearances on most Nintendo consoles, such was their enduring popularity.

The Super Nintendo will probably go down in history as the best retro console of its time. It had an extensive library of stellar games that went on to become classics. These included “Super Mario All Stars,” “Super Mario Kart,” “Starfox,” “Donkey Kong Country” and “Mortal Kombat.” But one area where the SNES really excelled was role-playing games.

A couple decades ago, arcade games were all the rage. And one genre of games that were as ubiquitous as any were brawlers, otherwise known as “beat ‘em ups.” These games made a seamless transition to consoles, offering home gamers the opportunity to take out relentless hordes of oncoming villains.

In 1995, console gaming was on the cusp of a new era. 16-bit systems were going the way of the buffalo, and 32-bit was the new news. Home gaming was poised to become more than side-scrolling platformers,

With Nintendo’s popularity at an all-time low, Xbox and PlayStation have become the Coke and Pepsi of home game consoles. But there was a time when there were many systems on the market from which to choose. 

Community college student Palmer Luckey made a splash at CES 2013 with his 3D gaming headset, the Oculus Rift. The buzz was so strong, in fact, that Facebook purchased Oculus in 2014 for the staggering sum of $2 billion. The interesting thing is that this technology is not new news.

For a while there in the 90s and 00s it looked like video games would be a medium in which you could never look back. Video games are a medium tightly bound to its underlying technologies, and with those technologies improving in leaps and bounds, playing a three-year-old game, let alone a ten-year-old game,

My retro review of Golden Sun briefly touches on the game’s major storytelling blunder alongside consideration of other elements of the game, many of which are quite well done. Here, though, I want to spend more time analyzing what went so terribly wrong with Golden Sun’s storytelling, especially the ending.