Super Mario Galaxy – Tired Old Hack

In my decade as a games journalist I’ve reviewed nearly 1000 games.

Most of these reviews were written during my six years at Official Nintendo Magazine (ONM), and most of these were small ones – indie titles, WiiWare and eShop games, retro Virtual Console releases and the like. But many were also multi-page reviews of triple-A titles.

One of the questions I’m most often asked is which of these reviews was my favourite. I have two.

The first is my Super Mario Galaxy review from ONM issue 23 (December 2007) and the second is my Super Mario Galaxy 2 review from ONM issue 56 (June 2010).

Another of the questions I’m asked is how to write a review. There’s no easy answer to this – indeed, there’s no answer at all. Every reviewer has a different style, so there’s no right way to do it.

What I’ve decided to do, though, is take you through my two favourite reviews and give you a little insight into how they were put together.

I’m going to take you on an annotated tour of my Super Mario Galaxy review and my Super Mario Galaxy 2 review. Continue reading “Writer’s commentary: Anatomy of a Mario Galaxy review” →

I’ve interviewed a number of game developers and other personalities over the years. Of them all, two stand out as personal favourites: Suda 51 and Shigeru Miyamoto.

I’ll cover my first Suda 51 interview in a later article, but for now let me focus on Miyamoto.

Me and Miyamoto — Plot twist: I was wearing trousers, he wasn’t

If you’ve got any sort of gaming knowledge, you know that Miyamoto is, quite simply, the man. If you don’t have any sort of gaming knowledge, I think you’ve ended up here by mistake, probably because you were searching for “Emma Watson upskirt” and Google brought you here because of this sentence. In which case stick around, you sick bastard, you might learn something.

Miyamoto is the single most influential video game creator and developer of all time. People will argue with this. Those people are wrong. Don’t fight them, pity them.

I’ve actually interviewed Miyamoto twice, and both were special for different reasons. The second time was in person, and led to the photo you see above, so naturally it was special for that reason alone: a one-on-one chat with the man whose work shaped my childhood and, ultimately, my career and life. Continue reading “My first Miyamoto interview from 2007” →