Category: October

When I was younger, I played a decent number of 3D platformers but generally steered clear of 2D platformers. This changed around the mid-2010s when I ended up playing the earlier Sonic games along with Super Meat Boy. Afterwards, I was far more receptive to them and would actively seek them out. However, as I continued to explore 2D platformers, I gradually became aware of a subgenre that is commonly, but not exclusively, associated with 2D platforming, Metroidvania. As I’ve played more and more of these games, I’ve come to realise that they’ve become one of my favourite genres. Having said all that, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what a Metroidvania game is and how I’ve come to love them.

First, let’s start by looking at the name “Metroidvania”. Interestingly, the genre name is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania and, understandably, speaks to the influence that these two franchises had. The original Metroid game, released in 1986, helped to establish the concept that your character starts out relatively basic with few abilities but explores a large map while gaining new permanent abilities that allows you to access areas that you weren’t able to before. Castlevania originally started out as a more typical platformer but shifted, with the release of Symphony of the Night in 1997, to a style similar to Metroid but including more RPG elements.

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I have a great admiration for the classics of the point and click adventure genre as many of them have a wonderful charm, sharp humour and interesting puzzles. However, there’s no debate that the heyday of these games has long passed and, while the genre certainly isn’t dead, new point and click adventure games are certainly much more sparse these days than in the past. However, with a new release in the venerable Monkey Island video game series, I thought it might be interesting to provide an overview of the games that make up this franchise.

The Secret of Monkey Island

The first game in the series, The Secret of Monkey Island, was originally released in 1990 and was directed by industry legend Ron Gilbert who also cowrote the game with Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. It follows Guybrush Threepwood who has just arrived at Mêlée Island in the hopes of becoming a pirate. The games style of humour has been rightly praised but one of the most important innovations that The Secret of Monkey Island contributed to the genre was the lack of death or dead ends. Prior to The Secret of Monkey Island, it was common in point and click adventure games to die due to a mistake or end up running into a dead end due to missing a key item earlier in the story. Ron Gilbert opposed this form of game design, saying “At no point should the player’s journey through the story in a game come to an abrupt end because they did something wrong.“

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I’ve spoken about the Steam Deck before, what my thoughts were, how I hoped that it would increase the Linux market share within gaming, provide competition in the portable gaming market etc. Now that it’s been out for a while, and clearly been successful, we’re continuing to see more and more fascinating information come out about the platform and its impact. One piece of info that I’ve found particularly interesting is the games that people are choosing to play and I thought it would be interesting to do a comparison of the most popular games on Steam and the Steam Deck.

Let’s start by taking a look at the most popular games on Steam itself. Looking at the chart below which was taken on the day that this article was written, you’ll notice that multiplayer games, particularly shooters, dominate the Steam platform with only a couple of games that could be considered single player scattered among them. This makes sense to me as multiplayer games tend to be highly replayable while also receiving content updates regularly.

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