My two Canadian pennies: Paper Mario: Sticker Star

Starting off with a confession: Since the N64 days, I’ve been a sucker for Paper Mario games. So when I got my 3DS XL two weeks ago, of course I started reading about the 3DS game to see if it’s worth it or not. Something was quickly obvious: Reviews were generally very sour for this game.

I now bought the game and played it a lot and I have to say this: It’s an amazing game! The game is charming, funny, beautiful, the farming-mechanics (stickers, coins) is very enjoyable, the puzzles don’t hold-your-hand (more on that below), and, as it’s supposed to be (again, more on that below), it’s different. 

Reviews, impressions and user-critics have essentially tore the game “a new one” based on a few points and I don’t think that game deserves some of the flack it’s been getting.

A lot of people turned away from this game because of the bad reputation it got. The following is mostly all subjective, but I felt this had to come out.

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My Relationship with Nintendo

Before I dive in, I wanted to mention that others have compared my relationship with Nintendo to a bad love relationship  or even an abusive relationship where the broken-hearted or abused periodically runs back to the heart-breaker or abuser. 

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Nintendo was my first gaming-love with the NES and Super Mario Bros. when I was about 5 years old. I had touched video-games before that time but I never had a real connection to video-games until then. 

This attachement to Nintendo consoles and games lasted for quite sometime. Soon after the GameBoy Advance, however, I started getting annoyed by certain trends Nintendo was pushing and certain decisions they were making. I jokingly refer to this “event” as “Nintendo breaking my heart”. This just means that I turned away from Nintendo releases. I kept playing what I already owned.

Later, Nintendo would turn things around or have period where they release a monsoon of games that would tickle my nostalgic fancy and I would run back in Nintendo’s arms.

This happened three times. If you’re close to me, you know I said Nintendo last broke my heart after the DS and Wii… and if the cycle happened three times, this means I’m coming back to Nintendo… again…

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Hard not too when Nintendo reveals sequels to two of my Top 3 favorite SNES games.