Daniel Tessier
Bio
I'm a terrible geek living in sunny Brighton on the Sussex coast in England. I enjoy writing about TV, comics, movies, LGBTQ issues and science.
Stories (62)
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Virtual Boy Wario Land: The forgotten Wario game
1995 saw Nintendo release some of its best platformer titles. Yoshi's Island, Donkey Country 2, Donkey Kong Land, Kirby's Dream Land 2 – all were released this year for the SNES (the former two) and Game Boy (the latter). There's one, however, that's been almost forgotten, along with the console it was released for, at least until Nintendo's surprising recent news for its Switch Online/Nintendo Classics service.
By Daniel Tessier2 months ago in Gamers
REVIEW: The Long Walk
Fifty boys walk in a straight line at three miles per hour for as long as they can. If they slow down or stop for too long, they’re shot dead. If they try to escape or even step off the road, they’re shot dead. The last boy walking wins untold riches and his heart’s desire.
By Daniel Tessier3 months ago in Horror
40 Years of Super Mario - Part 1: The 1980s
It’s September 2025 and Super Mario is forty years old. The first game in the series, the legendary Super Mario Bros. was released for the Famicom on 13th September 1985, one of the first games for Nintendo’s earliest true home console. It wouldn’t arrive on the Nintendo Entertainment System – the western version of the Famicom – until the following year in North America, as a launch title for the system, and not in PAL regions such as the UK and Europe until 1987. Regardless, the game was instrumental in revitalising the American video games market, which had suffered an almost lethal crash in 1983 due to a glut of low quality systems and games.
By Daniel Tessier4 months ago in Gamers
Yoshi's Island: A true classic
We all have a favourite video game, one that we return to time and again. Whatever your game of choice is, however old or new it is, playing it again takes you back to the first time you played it, while giving you something more than simple nostalgia value: genuinely classic gameplay.
By Daniel Tessier5 months ago in Gamers
Donkey Kong Land: a retrospective
Donkey Kong Land has a special place in my heart. It was the very first video game that I went out and bought, brand new, with my own money. In fact, it was money I’d received that day for my twelfth birthday. I walked to Woolworths with my best friend Paul (best-friendship still going strong) and bought myself my very own new game, in a special banana yellow cartridge.
By Daniel Tessier7 months ago in Gamers
The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002)
There have been at least thirty screen adaptations of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the best-known of all Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. In 2002, as part of BBC1’s Christmas programming and roughly marking the centenary of the novel’s publication, Tiger Aspect produced a TV movie starring Richard Roxburgh and Ian Hart as the deductive duo of Holmes and Watson.
By Daniel Tessier7 months ago in Geeks
Captain America: Brave New World
Brave New World is the fourth Captain America film for the MCU, and the first to see Anthony Mackie step up as the lead after playing second fiddle to Chris Evans for so long. It's also the 35th movie in the MCU as a whole, and deep into Phase 5 of the increasingly convoluted franchise. This perhaps explains some of the film's messiness and the mixed reviews it's been getting. It's inarguable that Brave New World tries to juggle too much of the franchise's unwieldy backstory, leaving us with a messy script. Yet, for all that, I found Brave New World to be a highly entertaining movie, one of the stronger Marvel movies of recent years, and a great showcase for Mackie's classy new Cap.
By Daniel Tessier11 months ago in Geeks
REVIEW: Nosferatu
Never underestimate the staying power of a good horror story. Over a century since F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was released, another version has rocked the world with its powerful gothic imagery. Of course, even the original Nosferatu wasn’t actually original, being simply Dracula with the names and half the setting changed, to the point where several versions have had the names of the main characters changed back to the ones from the book. It’s a funny thing, copyright: the 1922 Nosferatu was almost destroyed at the orders of Bram Stoker’s widow and now it’s in the worldwide public domain itself. Hence two remakes in just over two years (the 2023 version by David Lee Fisher has not made such a big impact, but it does star Doug Jones, so must be worth a look).
By Daniel Tessier11 months ago in Horror
The Gorgon. Content Warning.
The days were short on Sarpedon, the nights long, cold and desolate. Medusa sat on the hard granite floor of her lonely home, as the last embers of the sunset went out. It was always dark inside her home, but when night fell the darkness became so thick and dense she felt she could grab it by the handful. She wished she could wrap it around herself like a blanket, becoming a shadow. Nothing could hurt the darkness but the light, and she missed the light.
By Daniel Tessier11 months ago in Fiction
REVIEW - Star Trek: Section 31
After what seems like forever since it was first announced as another new Star Trek series, Section 31 finally arrives as Trek’s first streaming TV movie. Indeed, it’s a first for the franchise in a number of ways: the first production not to focus on Starfleet characters; the first to be set in the “lost era” between the original cast movies and The Next Generation; and the first to be headed by an East Asian and non-Anglosphere lead.
By Daniel Tessier12 months ago in Futurism
REVIEW: SMILE and SMILE 2
It was a smiley time this Hallowe’en, with Smile 2 in the cinemas and Smile itself hitting streaming services to cash in on this. It’s been a quick turnaround for writer-director Parker Finn, who released his short film Laura Hasn’t Slept in 2020, built on it with the feature-length follow-up Smile in 2022 and turned out the second feature this year. In that short time, the Smile sequence has established itself as one of the most popular and celebrated horror franchises of the last decade.
By Daniel Tessierabout a year ago in Horror
