Matt

The tale behind the potential Legend of Zelda LEGO set

To be perfectly honest, Nintendo completely botched Mario's 25th Anniversary... Super Mario Bros. deserved better. Arguably the most influential game of all time, it deserved to have the vaults opened wide for fans to have access to every bit of content related to the original title. After consuming the disc, we should've been left utterly full, yet definitively satiated. But that's not the route Nintendo decided to take -- instead, we got a disc with a rom of Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES, a flimsy book sprinkled with pull quotes, and a CD containing a shamefully bare selection of tracks. In essence, Nintendo celebrated the 25th anniversary of their iconic mascot by making a quick buck. And while this left us undeniably disappointed, hope remains.

Check out this Destructoid blog post chock-full of delicious Cave Story-related goodness, including details on future Steam updates (leaderboards!) and an upcoming (a month!) eShop release, as well as a good word on Wii U development and system power. Unfortunately, this pretty good news comes off the heels of some pretty bad news: La Mulana, the retro indie Metroidvania-adventure-platformer that Nicalis intended to publish on WiiWare, has been canceled, though a self-published PC release is still in the works by the developer, and you can still download the original freeware release.

Sword & Sworcery EP, the exploratory indie action adventure with an emphasis on audiovisual style previously only available on iOS, was just released on Steam and is 25% off till April 24.

This blog post by Chris Kohler is an excellent followup to one a few days ago, Videogames Can’t Afford to Cost This Much. Kohler chronicles the tectonic shifts that are taking place in the industry: Our games are going to be cheaper - probably substantially cheaper - but at the cost of full-scale games. "The power is going to ultimately shift from the publisher to the developer," cutting out the middlemen: retailers, publishers, and hardware makers. "We need developers to make games. We need players to play them. Everything in between is negotiable."

While we often see the evolution of artists working in old media, ever-shifting technical terrain tends to obscure videogame makers' aesthetic trajectories. In Thatgamecompany's pathbreaking and gorgeous games for the Playstation 3, we get the rare chance to watch these artists at work against a fixed technological backdrop.