Kirby finally made me stop wearing my mother’s clothes

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kirby super star

Kirby Super Star (1997)

When I was doing gaming videos with my pal in a desperate attempt to find YouTube popularity, I made the observation that I’d rather be caught wearing my mother’s clothes than have someone walk in on me playing a Kirby game. I can gleefully tell all you Kirby lovers out there that my partner did not immediately frown and slap me for making such a cretinous comment. Quite the opposite actually – he laughed, I laughed, we patted each other on the back and our anti-Kirby circlejerk continued.

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Top 5 Gaming Valentines

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Top 5 Gaming Valentines

St. Valentine’s Day is one of those obstacles that everyone has to get past, unfortunately – a day of painful reminders for the singletons, and an absolute minefield for those of us actually in a relationship. Still, I’m sure we all lap up a good romance in fiction, and that extends to gaming – even if the beau and the belle are little more than 8-bit pixels. Whether you live for February 14th, or whether you can’t wait for the whole rigmarole to be over, our look at five of gaming’s power couples should help get you in the Valentine’s mood.

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Nowt like a bit of grinding to make you go all hard-headed

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DragonQuest1

Dragon Quest (1986)

Now please believe me: I’d love to spend my days and nights playing only the very best games, the champagne titles, properly sinking 200 or more hours into your Witchers, your GTAs, your Breath of the Wilds, even your Saints Rows. Alas, I’m cursed to play games from all walks of life. I’ve got this first world problem of owning too many games consoles, which means that I’ve got access to a wide range of games, and that’s before you even get to emulators. So when you see that I’ve written a piece on the original Dragon Quest, AKA Dragon Warrior, I know you want to tut, roll your eyes and ask why I’ve bothered. Well, put it this way – at least you can press Back, or you can read on and be finished in a few minutes. Dragon Quest 1 took seven hours from me.

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Iron Mike’s gonna rip out your heart and feed it to the racists

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Mike Tysons PunchOut2

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! (1987)

They say sport is the great equaliser, and when it’s as accessible and universal as football, I have to agree. And give sport its dues, it helped break down a lot of race barriers. You’ll still get bananas thrown onto football pitches by knuckle-dragger fans. But as moronic as that is, how does that stack up against Muhammad Ali standing up to the white United States government and telling them he had no quarrel with them Viet Cong?

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 16)

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Building the Best Pokémon Team (Part 16)

Back to our trip of Hoenn, and we’re at that stage of the Pokédex that’s usually the most obscure: the beginning of the Dex is your starters, the common bird, the Rattata equivalent, and maybe a cute Pikaclone or two. The last section of the Regional Dex is where the mascot Legendaries, the Dragonite, and maybe some evolutions from previous Generations live. You don’t tend to forget about those guys.

Right before the heaps of Legendary Pokémon that Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald foisted on us is the likely lads below, with some of them quite a bit more forgettable than others. We’re talking chameleons, ghosties, and giant ice heads today. You can’t knock Hoenn for its variety, can you?

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Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a spinning roundhouse kick

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FatalDeviation

Fatal Deviation (1998)

When it came time for me to watch Fatal Deviation, it was obvious that a Blu-Ray, a DVD or even a dirty, corrupted old Betamax tape wasn’t exactly going to be available. Naturally I took a quick visit to a certain bay, which is usually my last resort (honest). But it wasn’t even available there either. And obviously, since there are approximately six films total on Netflix, and even those guys appear to have some sort of standards on what gets shown, this film wasn’t going to be found there. No, Fatal Deviation is what you’d call a YouTube-tier film, and there it was – Ireland’s first and last kung fu movie.

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It’s nice to look after the environment, but give us back our plastic straws

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Sonic CD (1993)

I know the environment is on a collision course to apocalypse land and that we’re killing the icecaps, and wringing turtles’ necks with six pack plastic rings. But what do you want me to do about it? Vote for the Green Party?! No chance. You leave it to them, and we’d all be stuck going to work in an ass and cart. They’d make us ration the amount of times we can flush the toilet each day. And fancy a straw or two for your freshly made G&T at the end of a long week? They’ll have you hauled over the non-GM coals and set alight with free-range fire.

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The US Air Force keeps writing checks my body can’t cash

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R-Type Delta

R-Type Delta (1999)

Bored on the job, I decided to investigate the possibility of a career change. I was therefore looking up the requirements to be a jet fighter pilot and bloody hell, the list was as long as your arm. I ask, do they want an air force or not? You’ll end up with nobody up there and the battle for air supremacy will be lost if you keep up that carry on. I’ve got more runner-up and participation medals than you can imagine, so clearly I’m a pretty qualified guy. But these Air Force heavies, all they wanna do is exclude you.

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My dear Dr. Jekyll has several personalities, and they’re all terrible

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Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1989) 

The ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ is no strange case at all. We all know the ending by now, of course, since it’s become a byword for every bipolar ex you’ve ever been with. The novella itself isn’t much to write home about. It’s nineteenth century, and set in Victorian London, so it’s all stiff upper lips and gollys, and my butler’s given me the incorrect fork for my liver and onions.

“Crivvens, Mr. Utterson, mayhaps I heard you ruminating in the drawing room” “I say, I wonder why you seem to be associated with a monstrous individual?” “Pray we shall speak no more of this” “I understand, old friend, though I don’t seem to be able to put two and two together for love nor farthings” – all that lark.

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In his first foray into Maths and Stats, Mario graduates with honours

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Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996)

I spent my college years wandering about in this kind of cynical trance, like Holden Caulfield. Didn’t really have anywhere to go, anyone to meet, so I just sat about writing and listening to music instead. Even if I’d studied or attended lectures, it’d have hardly made a difference anyway. I went to a ‘prestigious’ university, see. And they can’t fail you.

Maybe if you don’t turn up or if you vomit crayon wax all over the exam paper, you’ll score a big fat zero. But write your exam number down, blindly fill in some of the multi-choice questions, regurgitate parts of your earlier assignments that only barely passed anyway, and you’ve pretty much nailed it. See, if they were to fail you, then you’d go down as a negative statistic, harming the college’s reputation that bit more, domestically as well as internationally. And you know what that means? Lowered funding, something more unspeakable to an educational institution than Voldemort and Macbeth combined.

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