Ceave Gaming

- Season 6

(2021)

Ocarina of Time is, at least in my incredibly contrarian opinion, a pretty good video game. Not only did Ocarina of Time successfully bring the Zelda series into the third dimension, but it also ended up being highly influential, shaping certain conventions in gaming up until today. Long story short, the legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is widely considered to be an absolute masterpiece. But like every masterpiece this piece of art is composed of different pieces. And one of those pieces are the wicked dungeons that Link has to explore on his journey to save his ...

Nintendo built countless games over the decades, and Nintendo designed even more different stages for all those Nintendo games. Most of those games ended up being good, some ended up being weird, some were bad, and some are considered to be among the best games ever released. Yet out of all those games, featuring thousands over thousands of different levels, it is my honest belief that the volcano in Super Mario Sunshine is the absolute worst level Nintendo ever crafted, and that is not only because the level itself is bad. This isn't just the story of how Nintendo ...

In this video we are going onto a journey starting with the design of the Topman tribe in Super Mario Galaxy. We are not only going to discuss how those Super Mario Galaxy enemies might came to be, and why Super Mario Galaxy has such a unique premise, but we will also theorize about the economic restraints under which Super Mario Galaxy was developed by Nintendo, how those restraints might have forced Nintendo to make a huge gamble, how this gamble paid off at first, and how it almost ended up burning down the Wii's legacy years later.

Bowser's Fury is a really fascinating experimental game. Not only is Bowser's Fury a ton of fun to play through, but the game actually manages to solve a several decades old problem of the Super Mario Series. Bowser's Fury finally solves the 3D Mario paradox that Nintendo has been struggling with for decades. In this video we are going to take a look at the 3D Super Mario paradox, at how Bowser's Fury solves it, and what all of this means for the future of Super Mario.

Nintendo is famous for always putting gameplay first. Nintendo is usually more concerned with the moment to moment gameplay of their games than any other big player in the industry. This approach allowed them to craft revolutionary gaming experiences over and over and over again. Until very recently. Because, recently I played through Nintendo's newest Mario adventure, Bowser's Fury, and while I overall really enjoyed my time with Bowser's Fury, it also kind of opened my eyes for a problem that many recent Nintendo games have. Many of Nintendo's recent titles are so ...

About four years ago I uploaded a video called "Why Your Weapons Break in the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild". In this video I argued that the weapon durability system in Breath of the Wild is actually a genius design choice, that allowed Nintendo to redefine how open world games are designed. Since then, I completely changed my opinion about the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's brittle weapons. So with Breath of the Wild's sequel right around the corner I thought it might be time to revisit this topic. Today we are going to embark on a journey. We are going...

The original Super Mario Maker is probably my favorite game of all time, yet the original Super Mario Maker didn't even life to see it's own sixth birthday. It is no longer possible to upload stages. So now that Nintendo officially put the original Super Mario Maker down, I thought it might be a good time to take a look back at, what in my opinion are, the two most interesting and remarkable aspects of the original Super Mario Maker. In this video we are going to discuss what I believe to be the best and the worst aspect of my favorite video game of all time.

I never quite enjoyed Super Mario Maker 2 as much as I enjoyed the original Super Mario Maker. Which is kind of weird, because I really, really do like Super Mario Maker 2. It makes tons of incredible improvements while featuring basically all the content of the original Super Mario Maker. It's as flawless as a sequel can get. At least on paper. But there is this one thing that Super Mario Maker 2 really messed up. In this video we are going to take a look at Super Mario Maker 2's fundamental flaw.

About two years ago we tried to beat Super Mario 3D World while permanently crouching, and the run actually ended up being a ton of fun. Naturally I thought it might be fun to try to see if it is possible to beat Bowser's Fury while permanently crouching as well only to quickly find out yes, the game can be beaten like this indeed. It's actually surprisingly simple. Thanks to the nonlinear nature of Bowser's Fury it is incredibly easy to beat the game while permanently crouching. We can simply route Bowser's Fury in such a way that a run like this doesn't provide any ...

Most of the costumes in Super Mario Odyssey celebrate some of the greatest moments in Mario's history. But then there are also a bunch of other costumes in Super Mario Odyssey whose inclusion, well, let's put it that way: If I were Nintendo reminding people about the origin story of those costumes, really wouldn't be that high up in my list of priorities. A bunch of the Super Mario Odyssey costumes just have really obscure origin stories, or originated under circumstances that don't put Nintendo into a very favorable light. Today we are going to focus on exactly those...