Metroid Database.com

If you need a little more help to get into that Cinco de Mayo spirit, let me just stop you there to recommend the totally awesome Guacamelee! This fantastic action-adventure is probably the greatest thing to happen to Metroidvania since Outland. You play as a luchador (masked Mexican wrestler) who must save the world from evil skeletons. Along the way, you grab a ton of abilities such as wall-jumping and wall-dashing, all with fantastic goat-themed names (seriously!). Your new powers will allow you to break down walls or perform new moves, giving you access to new areas of the game. It will take a considerable amount of exploration to track down all the nooks and crannies. And that's not all! The game is chock-full of cameos to other classic games, including Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Castle Crashers, and Metroid!

That's right, there are statues of Metroids, along with 'Choozo Statues' that contain all your great power-ups! Oh, and did I mention it's two-player co-op???

Guacamelee! is a beat 'em up, and you'll spend most of your time beating up skeleton hombres with a wide array of kicks, punches, and head-butts. The environments are fantastic - lush forest, burning desert, and mountain passes are just three, and they're all painted with elegant Latin watercolor, all accompanied to epic Mexican ballads. It really makes you realize how awesome the culture is. This variety is also deeply refreshing for a genre that has largely been limited to the same old renditions of lava area, jungle area, rock area, and ice area (or more stuffy old castles, as with Castlevania). Since one of the great things about Metroidvania is exploration, it's pure joy to travel through a land completely new.

Since the game is based around the Dio de los Muertos (Day of the Dead, an important holiday in Mexican culture), there is also a great mechanic where you can go back and forth between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Unlike A Link to the Past, however, there is no puzzle-solving involving changing things in one world to affect the other. Rather, it is a tool for exploration - switching between the worlds will open up new paths forward. In later areas, there are some tricky wall-jump action that will make Super Metroid fans proud.

The only real downside is the game's length (five dungeons that can be cleared in about 5-6 hours, depending on how much exploring you do). However, the game boasts a lot of replay value through hard mode and speedruns - and it even ranks you against all other players. That's a feature we'd like to see in the next Metroid, too! Still, it's a good price at $15, and any Metroid fan would be doing themselves a favor by picking it up. And who knows - if they sell enough copies, we can probably expect a bigger, better Guacamelee 2! You can play the game on PS3 or PSVita.

Until next time...
Captain Commando