Change can suck, but whoever said it has to?  In our efforts to bring more exposure to Hardestlevel and appeal to a wider range of audiences, I had to take some time to seriously reconsider how the heck I was going to continue writing about games.  For me, I'm a hardcore gamer at heart and always have been.

Some people daydream about about buying those new shoes on their next payday, or taking a trip to Europe with their great-grandmother Bethany.  I dream about games.  I dream about the games I've played in the past, the game I'm playing now and the games I want to play in the near future.  I'm constantly working out schemes to budget my video game addict...er...habit, and always looking forward to getting my good ol' 360 controller in my hand.

I don't know much about retro Nintendo gear or people making cakes that look like Pac Man.  I never looked forward to Wii Motion Plus (what a rip-off, give me a break) or the next Pokemon game.  Go ahead, skewer me and burn me at the stake.  But my world is about story-telling, cutting-edge graphics and pushing my gaming skills to the limit.  I don't want to flail around in front of my television or struggle to play Call of Duty with a cheap light-gun.

I want to mod PC games and share the fruits of my labor with a gaming crowd.  I want to stay up at night and drool (quite literally) over games like Diablo III, God of War III, Fable III and any other title with a III in it apparently.

So I say unto you, readers, to cut me some slack.  For the remainder of my time at HL I will do my best to tone down my antics and think up of some awesome stuff we can all relate to.  For now, this has been my rant, may your thumbs never ache.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled.  Banjo Kazzoie and Banjo Tooie.

We've been seeing a rash of re-makes of classic games this summer, and part of me has to wonder at what has brought about this relatively recent phenomenon.  Gamers have become rabid over some of these releases in the past couple of months, and they're not even new games!  Simply put, these are games we've played before with minor tweaks and graphical updates.  TMNT did go a bit further with the graphics sprucing, but it generally remains the same game.


Why do we need this?  Have we all suddenly become so nostalgic for games we've played hundreds of times before?  Banjo Kazooie was a great game when I was in middle school; I would play that sucker for hours on end, completely sucked into the world and collecting those, well, everything!  But is it really worth shelling out (excuse the pun) more cash to play something I've finished before?

Companies like Rare certainly seem to think so, and with the success of Nintendo's retro games on WiiWare, we probably won't be seeing an end to this anytime soon.  Is this rash going to fade with time?  Don't make me break out the lotion, people, spend more time on your new games rather than throwing stuff at us from the way-back machine.