Aside from brief tries of the NES Metroid and the SNES Super Metroid, I have never tried to sit down and finish a game from the Metroid series before now.


While I'm well versed in Mario and Zelda, Metroid, for me, is the lost franchise, the game that everyone else seems to have played endlessly and loved unconditionally. But I never had them on the older systems and neither did any of my friends. And when I broke up with Nintendo to chase Final Fantasy to the Playstation, I missed the Prime series on the Gamecube entirely.


And then one day I was browsing aimlessly through a Blockbuster Video and I came across a new, sealed copy of Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Nintendo Wii, a limited edition 3-in-1 disc that had since gone out of print. So I bought it. And I'm not sure why.


I am a bit of a compulsive collector. It started with comics and then graduated to books. I have a modest collection of Transformers toys. I just like...

I bought Bushido Blade 2 simply because it was made by the same company who made the Final Fantasy games, Squaresoft (now known as Square-Enix). My teenage mind was that shallow. To pimply me, Squaresoft could do no wrong, having blessed me with Super Nintendo classics like Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG.


From there, the company's exclusivity to the Sony Playstation ended my relationship with Nintendo, a break up that lasted well over a decade, up until a few years ago when I was given a Wii for my birthday.


Bushido Blade 2 is a dead simple fighting game. There are two rival schools of assassins and they stab each other senseless all over Japan using all manner of sharp objects. What made this game (and its predecessor, which I never played) unique at the time was the fact that there were no life bars. Instead, it was “real”: You get stabbed in the arm, you lose use of that arm. Get stabbed in the legs, you hobble...