Marc Normandin

1 day ago | pastemagazine.com | Marc Normandin

Listen to this article Your browser does not support the audio element. Namco’s history—especially in their era of arcade dominance—is full of zigs and zags. Invent or refine a genre and create a popular, pivotal, and influential game in the process?

1 week ago | baseballprospectus.com | Marc Normandin

They don't get one for effort, either.

2 weeks ago | pastemagazine.com | Marc Normandin

Majora’s Mask, which was originally released 25 years ago this weekend, is something of an outlier in the long-running Legend of Zelda series. It fits the early conventions of the series in that it’s a direct sequel that gets a little weird with it—a time-honored tradition that, in the case of games like Link’s Awakening and Majora’s Mask itself, produced a better game than its Triforce-centered predecessor—but otherwise… well, there’s nothing quite like it.

3 weeks ago | baseballprospectus.com | Marc Normandin

1 month ago | pastemagazine.com | Marc Normandin

Let’s start here: Gradius Origins is a great, and overdue, idea. A package consisting of not just some early, classic Gradius titles, but multiple versions of them—no small thing for a series like Gradius, which released multiple games after the original Gradius before officially reaching the game we know of and consider as Gradius II. A series where Salamander (Japan) and Life Force (North America) are the same, except not, and also Life Force (Japan again) is different still.