Oh dear, it appears that Wikipedia’s Metroidvania page has been culled due to its general lack of merit. Looking at the page discussion, the blame falls squarely on me for failing to provide a solid definition for the term. Apparently, if I’d used the word in more of my professional writing, it would have been legitimized. Buuuut since the word is tacky and generally pretty much useless and I’ve made an effort to edit it out of anything ever to appear at 1UP, I guess it had to die. And all because of me! It’s good to know I managed accomplished something worthwhile in 2006 after all.
Farewell, Unverifiable Neologism with Insufficient Reference Sourcing. I will desperately miss the three or four daily hits you used to provide.
Anyway, my final act of video game journalism for the year is online now: another 1UP retro roundup. Haha, “video game journalism.” Sorry, I can never write that with a straight face.
Not being in that particular industry, I do wonder if anyone can write that and keep a straight face.
You just KILLED the INTERNET.
shame..
jeremy i like the stuff you write
i’d love if you would write something on kid icarus or a boy and his blob.
there’s rumours on kid icarus on the wii.. i’d love that game, probably because i’m a sucker for mythology
nice website! cheers and happy new year
Agreed on pretty much everything in the roundup. I’m surprised Sony USA didn’t counter R-Type with a killer shooter. Come on, they could have done R-Types for one. If not, there’s still Raystorm, Raycrisis, Raiden Project, and many more.
I got Super Castlevania IV only. I already have SMB on All Stars and NES. However, even SMB has reason to be bitter–Nintendo had the audaucity to trumpet on their website that it’s a special “treat” and liken it to a “gift.” Yes, paying 5 dollars for a 21 year old game is a real treat. Brilliant, Nintendo. The game should have come free, and with a letter of apology to anyone who downloaded Mario Bros. by mistake.
I naturally balked at SF2, although I did pull out the original cart (yeah, of SF2, not SF2T or SSF2) and played the heck out of it. It still has plenty of great appeal behind it. Sure, on PS2 and 360 you could play ports of the original arcade games, but that’s also with the arcade A.I.
So while playing Super Turbo against friends is a great experience, playing the computer holds no joy whatsoever. At least on SNES the difficulty adjustments actually are as described, rather than a futile exercise resulting in Chun-Li kicking your ass 40 times in a row with vicious combos and inhuman reflexes.
Are you seriously embarassed about the term? I really enjoyed it, personally, even though it is inevitably a lame phrase. Also, there’s nothing really around to replace but the even worse “castleroid”.
Plus, “Castleroids” sound like they’d be painful and itcy.
Oh, I think they’d be worse than itchy.
I use “metroidvania” fairly liberally, so it makes me sad that it is no longer a wiki-worthy (w-w for short) word.
Sorry Parish but the term Metroidvania is just stupid and it just shows that you have a very narrow taste in videogames. Go play some Commodore, you soft core gamer.
Wow, 1up.com is so very very broken right now. Happy new year, everyone! I think its Java code is telling me to get off the computer and go appreciate some actual people or something…
LOL@Gandalfini
what a snob
No, seriously, I highly recommend The Last Ninja 1 and 2 (3 takes too much time to love). It certainly deserves more attention than it gets. Well, not really if you consider that most people who were fans of that game are in their late 30’s/early 40’s with no time whatsoever to mantain a website or bitch at Gamefaqs. I also recomment “La Abadia del Crimen” and Fairlight.
Give Commodore a chance!
Pardon me for being a twit, but I thought Metroidvania was just Parish’s term for games that featured a mixture of platforming and RPG elements with just a little collecting thrown in for frustration? The term’s just a way of categorizing a certain type of game, and not in itself indicative of Parish’s gaming tastes.
I don’t think it was even coined by Parish (given his utter disdain for the term), so I don’t know why all the ruckus. Although, ironically, Parish does have a taste for said genre -as most Toastyfroggers do, I assume.
Yeah, I didn’t come up with the term. I just coopted it out of convenience, although I’ve never been particularly fond of it. Language is stupid that way. Like, I hate the word “retard,” but how else can you describe the bulk of the Internet so efficiently?
I could totally use ‘video game journalism’ with a straight face. I only know of about two, though, and they’re journalists with mainstream publications who happen to cover video games; they can afford to be investigative and all that proper journalism stuff without being blackballed by the PR firms.
Wikipedia is totally like that, though – they’ll delete something that’s noteworthy because the author doesn’t see fit to include a note on its significance, authors of obscure-but-still-notable articles usually thinking that it’s okay to just describe what it is. Silly Internet. Don’t they know they’re supposed to join the Wikipedia bureaucracy?
I wonder whether someday people will decide on a centralized website to become the Wikipedia-extension for articles that are interesting (to someone) but are just never going to meet WP’s notability standards. I mean, sure, lots of such wikis exist already, but unless you have a particular niche you’re looking for they tend to be too scattered to be very useful.
You have to admit that “Metroidvania” makes for a pretty silly Wikipedia article. There are much higher-concept articles on Wikipedia to be riddled with bias and errors.
Kirin: Yeah, the problem is, for video games there are too damn many wikis, and the few that have even a little traction have little to no quality control. It would be nice if there was a Wookieepedia, Memory Alpha or Battlestarwiki for video games, but the best we have right now is Wikipedia, followed in the far off distance by Egamia or StrategyWiki.
I spent a ton of time on Wikipedia but eventually grew to hate the “bureaucracy” and well… if I wanted to join MySpace, I’d be on it. Thing is to write on WP over the long term, you have to go through way, way too much trouble defending your writing, talking to “established” editors, etc.
There’s tons of silly things on Wikipedia, but how many people GO to Wikipedia for that stuff? Almost everybody. Just look at the kind of stuff is in the most visited pages – google it, it’s too long to put here. #4 for Dec. 2006? Wii. (#16 – List of big-bust models and performers. (And “List of Marvel Comics characters was slotted 1 above Vietnam War. Haha.)
I sure as hell wouldn’t use WP for anything but the most casual research. That said, the argument “there are more important articles to work on” is definitely true, but the people who can actually WRITE those articles probably have a job that they get paid for, while there are plenty of jerkoffs like you or I who can wax on about video game journalism, comics, and whatever. Fun to read, but it doesn’t necessarily detract from “serious” articles – those are purely the fault of whoever decided to write on those pages.