On this, the one-hundred and fifty-seventh episode of Barrel Roll, Jonah and Jesse are on their own. It’s up to the two of them to talk about video games and attempt to keep you edutained.

The Portal 2 authoring tools dropped, and both the guys have been playing around with them. They go into the good and bad of using it with no prior design experience. On the board game front, Jonah picked up a copy of Tetris Link, which is kind of broken but has the potential to be really fun. Jonah also finally got his own copy of Kid Icarus Uprising, which leads to talk of multiplayer, and leads Jesse down a dark path of discussing the original Kid Icarus, which he was playing via the 3D Classics edition.

Since there hadn’t been nearly enough wizard talk in a while, Jonah brings up the Civ V styled wizard strategy game Warlock - Master of the Arcane, and the obscure end of the world, flashlight based Wii game Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon.

All this and more on Barrel Roll #157, “Is that Snake Coming on to Me?”

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I do not like the original Kid Icarus. I didn’t like it in its heyday and I didn’t like it when I played the recent 3D Classics downloadable version. So make no mistake that when I say I absolutely adore Kid Icarus Uprising on the 3DS, it is in no way related to nostalgia.

That said, I adore this game.

Like the original’s mix of Ice Climbers-esque platforming, Metroid-like exploration, and shmup style final stage, Kid Icarus Uprising divides its time between a few game types. For the most part, stages start with you flying around as Pit in a third person rail shooter that plays like Sin & Punishment: Star Successor practically verbatim. These sections never waste a moment of your time. Every second is a roller-coaster of arcade action.

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I never really got into Kid Icarus, short lived as it was. My greatest exposure to the series was Captain N: The Game Master. I also wouldn’t have figured it’d have retained much of a fan base over the years. So it was pretty surprising at least year’s E3 when Nintendo announced Kid Icarus: Uprising as one of their initial offerings for the Nintendo 3DS. This take on the series comes off as an entirely different kind of game, which I do believe is for the better.

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“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

In our horribly named, but entirely delightful, weekly series, we jump into the official WingDamage Delorean and go back… back in time to examine some of the games of yesteryear. So let’s see if we can get this baby up to 88 miles per hour and go back to 1985 and look at Duck Hunt for the NES.

The Nintendo Entertainment System came packed with the raddest looking light gun in the history of video games. In the 80′s, the NES zapper looked like the future. When you were done pretending to shoot your friends with it, you could use it to play what I still consider to be one of the best light gun game ever made.

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"Y'know that dance wasn't as safe as they said it was"

*Update* - The original file was corrupted and about a half hour of the episode was silence. Please re-download the episode, and don’t forget to enter the drawing for our PAX Pack Giveaway #2 by answering the question presented at the end of the show, “Which one counts as mine?”

On a very special thirty-second episode of Barrel Roll! A Video Game Podcast, the WingDamage crew of Men Without Hats gather to discuss the Uncharted 2 multiplayer Beta, the sword swinging 2D extravaganza that is “Muramasa”, and more iPhone game love from our own regular guest host Wesley Johnson.

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