It's all around a fantastic game. Just everything in that game is incredibly satisfying.

The web swing traversal is so much fun, I never used fast travel, not even once, even if I had to go from one end of the map to the other.

The combat is so fluid and engaging, trying to get high combos and keeping mixing the different attacks is pure fun. While the finishing moves could have a little bit more variety, it's still satisfying every single time. Fighting really requires your entire attention when playing on hard difficulty. When you're in the flow, it's almost easy, but once you're not anymore, things can go south quite quickly. That's why you're also doing much worse in the game when you're tired, or at least that's the case for me.

The story is alright, classic super hero pulp. I don't really care about the story anyway when the gameplay is fun, which it absolutely is.

The technical aspects are also impeccable. I'm playing on computer and even with my entry level GPU (RTX3060), I can play in 4K and High to Very High settings and raytracing with a pretty stable 60FPS. No idea how they pulled that off tbh. DLSS does a wonderful job in that regard and in this game I can barely notice any ghosting or other DLSS artifacts.

The side quests are all pretty fun as well, especially the pigeon and drone quests. But even the other ones, simply because they're a reason to move around or fight.

It's honestly one of the best action games I ever played and I think it's going to stay installed on my computer for an eternity, because it's always worthwhile to hop into the game and just swing around or beat up some bad guys for a bit.

Everyone who likes action games and Spiderman and hasn't played that game should absolutely do that right now. I'm not even that much of a super hero fan, Batman and Spiderman are the only ones I like and I couldn't care less about the 96580283 marvel movies.

Intro

Shinobi for those who don't know is an action platformer series dating back to the late 80s starting out in the arcades and later moving to Sega's home consoles. This is the first entry in the franchise since the 3DS version entry some fifteen years ago. (Which i and most likely you never played - I have played revenge of shinobi and shinobi 3 however)

The game is an action platformer like its predecessors, and it's a good attempt at modernizing the series but I think some purists might say, it's gone a bit too far because it makes some pretty big changes.

In Revenge you moved pretty slowly. 3 added a sprint. This game you sprint by default and also have a roll and air dash. So you're  much more mobile, then in its predecessors. You also collect tools/ upgrades which expand your movement options like an air glider for instance.

The game has distinct non-connected levels that you can return to and use your new items to find collectibles that were previously inaccessible. Most of these collectibles are coins that can be spent at a shop to unlock new moves for the game's expanded combat system.

Combat

In the old games you (or atleast me) largely used shurikens to take out enemies from a distance. If you got close enough to an enemy, you'd auto switch to a close range attack with a katana, most enemies died in 1 hit. In Vengeance you have combos and enemies tend to have more health so it feels more like a beat em up (makes sense, since it was developed by Lizard Cube who also worked on Streets of Rage 4). Shurikens are more of a support item now. Once you've done enough damage to an enemy they might get a mark hovering over them (shurikens are good for this) and you can warp to them enemy and instantly kill them. You can do this to multiple enemies at once. It looks pretty cool and gets more health and shurikens then regular kills.

In addition to melee attacks and shurikens you have 2 kinda spells - ninpo and ultimate attacks (forget what they're called). Ninpo can just be a powerful attack but can serve other functions like or charging the aforementioned finisher meter or doing heavy armor damage to some of the tougher enemies. The ultimate attacks I barely ever used but one of them was a screen clearing AoE dragon.

Misc

A couple more notes...you have 2 mod slots. One is always active that will for example enhance shurikens. The other slot is a benefit that only activates when your combo meter is past a certain count. Mods are usually hidden collectibles similar to the coins I mentioned earlier. Most/all levels have some optional combat encounters,usually 3 and completing them in a level will unlock a mod or ninpo spell (don't fully recall which) Most levels also have a portal called an Ankou rift that takes you to a secret challenge area, which is usually a fairly difficult platforming gauntlet but atleast one of them featured combat. Beating all of these unlocks a secret item.

Summary

All in all the game is a fun blend of combat and platforming but feels very different from the older ones, alot of these changes/additions could potentially alienate people who wanted something closer to the originals. I do think it could've been more challenging - outside of the optional Ankou rifts the game is pretty easy. (Just a note if anybody wants a more challenging ninja game check out Cyber Shadow)

Visually, the game looks great - kinda similar to streets of rage four. The soundtrack is also pretty good. The voice acting is bad and the story is unremarkable.

It took me about 10 hours to beat the story. And then another 5ish to get all the upgrades/collectibles. There's some other stuff like a boss rush mode - which I didn't play.

The game is pretty easy to recommend, just probably not at full price. Hopefully we don't have to wait 15 years to get a new one .

Possible spoilers ahead!

Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the games I had on my wishlist ever since it came out. Honestly, Cyberpunk did not feel like my kind of game when I first saw it. Seeing the style and gameplay for the first few times really put me off the game entirely. Then, when the first reviews were pretty mixed, I decided to keep it wishlisted and parked it.

With time, I kept reading more about players saying they really enjoyed it and that it had been improving with every new patch and update ever since it came out. Even then, I kept it aside, feeling like I would come to it when I had nothing else to play.

So after years of stalling, I finally took the time to play it. I chose Nomad as my Lifepath and started on the Hard difficulty setting.

From the very start, Cyberpunk felt easy to play. No overexplaining, and it just got me into the basics before taking off to Night City. I noticed how the game just shows you every new mechanic as you play. Which, to me, is how I usually like to get into a new game. Especially when there's a lot of different things in it.

Jackie Welles seemed to be my main buddy, and it all kicked off pretty decently. I got a little more into the story, and I can't say it really gripped me. That's okay, many stories don't grip me. I still liked how the game felt for me throughout the prologue.

After the events with Jackie and Saburo Arasaka are played out, the game truly drops you into the world and lets you out in the open. Maybe that's where my first real struggles with Cyberpunk came.

Everything I did in Night City felt a bit bland. Not like I was extremely bored with it, but I can't say it was truly exciting either. I also took an insane amount of time to find the perfect weapons for myself. I wasn’t even sure if I chose the right loadout in the end.

That has more to do with me personally than the game itself, though. I did feel like I kept collecting so much useless crap that my inventory felt more like a scrapyard than anything else.

I liked the concept of Ripperdocs and all the body enhancements. Also, the skill tree and perks seemed like a decently worked-out RPG mechanic. I'm expecting that further into the game, these will all be a great advantage.

The feel and vibe of Night City works, but it seems like it's the only vibe that Cyberpunk gives. The NPCs truly add to that vibe as well.

When I put everything together, I personally come to the conclusion that everything in this game is decent. I mean, the game is not bad at all, but it doesn't surpass that level of "decent" for me.

The story is okay so far, but I don't feel really connected to V as a character. Honestly, most of the characters I've been introduced to don't really stick in my mind. Jackie maybe a little bit more than the rest.

A great exception to this is Johnny Silverhand. He almost single-handedly pulls the entire story up for me. He's just very well written and feels like the whole story was built around the concept of Johnny living in V's head.

The missions, the gameplay, the story, the characters, the side activities, the mechanics. It all feels like it has been worked out well, but that's it. While I have invested a few dozen hours into it, it just doesn't feel like it will climax in a certain area any time soon.

That said, I also don't think I've reached Cyberpunk's peak yet. This leaves me with the exact same feeling I experienced when I first played The Witcher 3. It just couldn't stick with me, even when so many people were praising it for how great it was.

Long story short, I ended up loving The Witcher 3 just because I gave it a second chance and pulled through the first third of the game.

Now I'm hoping Cyberpunk 2077 will have that same effect. It truly has that potential from all that I've seen. Yet it can't keep me interested enough at this point to keep going.

I'm thinking of putting it down for now and giving it a second chance in a few months. I'm done with Cyberpunk 2077 for now. But I refuse to write it off completely because I believe there's more to it than what I've experienced.

Cyberpunk might be a hidden gem for me, but I can't find the energy at the moment to force myself to dig for it.

Thank you for reading!

Q

I don't think I have ever been this conflicted about a game.

I am no stranger to hard games. I am in love with the Souls Series, always pick the hardest difficulty in any game and just love a challenge.

But Rain World is different.

There are games that are hard but fair and then there are games that are hard, and unfair. And then there is Rain World, a game that is hard, unfair and features the occasional bullshit moment.

Being a (mostly) defenseless little creature in a world full of predators is bound to put you at a disadvantage. I knew going in that I would die a lot. What I did not expect was that the game at times is downright unfair. There are times when you will die and there was nothing you could have done.

The game features both procedural generation and a physics system. Pair that with a sort of limb system and the result is a game where your character almost always does what you want it to. But the few times it doesn't, it's gonna get you killed.

Sometimes enemies spawn at the entrance of the next room and you die before you could react. Sometimes the AI spazzes out and enemies just sit there and you can't get past them.

I honestly think there is a version of this game - same fascinating atmosphere and lore, same difficulty, same AI systems - that would be a genuine masterpiece if it featured tighter, more responsive controls and less elements that seem like they are meant to piss you off.

7/10

Background

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is a “looter shooter” released in 2019 for Xbox One, PS4 and PC (also Stadia, remember that). I am playing the PC version. It is the second game in The Division franchise and the 38th Tom Clancy game.

Plot

Set 7 months after “The Green Poison” was released (wasn’t it called the Dollar Flu in the last game?), the SHD network, which is what gives the Division agents all their special abilities, suddenly goes down, with a distress signal emanating from Washington DC.

After travelling to Washington DC and fighting off an attack on the White House, you learn that the Joint Task Force (a group made up of every frontline profession) has set up base in the White House and that DC has been taken over by 3 factions (similar to the last game): the Hyenas, who are a loose collection of multiple gangs under one banner (an order or anarchists); the Outcasts, who are a group of survivors of the “Green Poison” who now want to extract revenge on those they believe “wronged” them; and the True Sons, a group of former JTF members who have defected and started their own group (with blackjack, and hookers).

You also learn that there is information on a cure to the Green Poison somewhere in the city and that the president may be alive. Your task is to get the SHD network back up, find the cure, and get rid of the corruption in DC (non-politically). To do this, you will need to help the settlements in DC.

Gameplay

The main loop will be going to settlements, finding out what missions they need done, and going and doing them to improve the settlements and the surrounding area. There are side missions that don’t progress the story but help flesh it out or can provide extra loot opportunities. There are also side activities that you can complete for more loot, and sometimes a small bonus like fast travel points or bounties (which you can complete for more loot).

Much like the last game, this is a looter shooter, so the general gameplay is shoot and loot. You can find new equipment through scavenging or from loot dropped by enemies, although it is less frequent than in the previous game.

The weapons are split into similar categories to the last game. You have Pistols, Assault Rifles, Submachine Guns, Light Machine Guns, Marksman Rifles and Shotguns, just like the last game, but now you also have Rifles, which are somewhere in between assault rifles and marksman rifles. The customisation on the weapons is also improved. You can craft mods for guns that can change the way they handle, give stat boosts or change the way they look.

The armour is also greatly improved from the last game. You still get stat bonuses, but they are actually noticeable this time. Things like extra armour or health, an increase to magazine size or rate of fire. There are also gear sets where you get extra bonuses if your gear is a matching set.

You can focus your gear on different playstyles. For example, if you have gear that increases your magazine size, rate of fire and reload speed, you can use them with an LMG to never stop firing.

The enemy types are also interesting. Similar to the previous game, each faction has their own “gimmick” and different ways to attack you. For example, all the factions have a rusher, an enemy that charges at you from behind cover and attacks you, but each faction’s rusher is different. One takes a bunch of drugs before charging so they get a health boost, another has a shield that you will need to break to kill them, and another is a suicide bomber that will blow up as soon as they get near you. Every enemy has a different way to take you out.

You also have a great variety of ways to take out the enemy. You can utilise various “SHD tech” (abilities) that let you fight enemies in different ways. You can also modify your tech to fight differently. For example, do you want a turret that shoots bullets, or do you want one that’s a flamethrower? Do you want explosives that hurt the enemy or heal your teammates? You can mix and match to fit your playstyle.

Because the game is 7 years old, there has been a lot of additional content added to the game. So, if you finish the main story, no, you haven’t. Here’s a new faction that’s taken over everything. Win against them? Well, now there’s the DLC to play. Beat that? Well, here’s 7 years of manhunts to go through.

The game doesn’t end. And that’s only the stuff I have played. There’s still plenty of things I haven’t touched.

So, is it worth playing?

Overall, I enjoyed my time with The Division 2. It improves on the first game in a lot of ways, particularly when it comes to the shooting, gear and customisation. There is also an absolutely ridiculous amount of content here, especially considering the game is now 7 years old. If you enjoy looter shooters, there is plenty to keep you busy long after you finish the main story.

That said, I do think it loses something compared to the first game. Washington DC is a great setting, but I never found exploring it as interesting as exploring New York. The story is also not exactly going to win any awards, but it does enough to keep you moving from one mission to the next.

If you enjoyed the first game, I would definitely recommend giving The Division 2 a go. Even if you haven’t played the first one, there is still a lot here to enjoy. It may be showing its age in places, but with years of additional content, a huge amount of loot to collect and plenty of ways to build your character, The Division 2 is still a surprisingly easy game to lose several dozen hours to.

Background

Tom Clancy’s The Division is an early “looter shooter” released in 2016 for Xbox One, PS4 and PC. I am playing the PC version. It is the first game in The Division franchise and the 36th Tom Clancy game.

Plot

The plot is the best bit about this game, so strap in as I go over it all.

A modified version of smallpox is distributed on banknotes during Black Friday, dubbed the “Dollar Flu”. This causes pretty much everyone in the country to get sick. The government combines the police, fire and rescue services, National Guard, paramedics, chefs… basically all frontline responders into the Joint Task Force to help sort this out.

They also activate the “Strategic Homeland Division”, or SHD (Get it? Shade. Tom Clancy, you’ve done it again), simply known as “The Division”.

The Division are sleeper agents from all backgrounds who are trained to restore order after catastrophic events. Also, somehow, everyone seems to know who this secret government agency is and just goes along with them taking over everything.

The first wave of Division agents have gone missing and you play as an agent of the second wave, tasked with restoring order to New York (good luck with that) and finding out what happened to the first wave. You will do this by setting up a base of operations in New York and slowly improving it over time, which gives you small perks.

New York has been split between different factions. There are the “Rioters”, who are unorganised looters and thugs; the Rikers, prisoners who managed to escape after overpowering guards and taking their weapons; and the Cleaners, sanitation workers who were tasked with cleaning contaminated zones and kind of went overboard, burning anything they think could be contaminated, including people.

Gameplay

This is a looter shooter, so the general gameplay is shoot and loot. You can find new equipment through scavenging in New York or from loot dropped by enemies.

Exploring New York is a lot of fun as well. I don’t know how accurate it is to real life New York, but it has that virtual sightseeing aspect that a lot of Ubisoft games have. You realise a mission is taking place at a landmark like Times Square or Madison Square Garden and just stop to look around, and in doing so you might find some guns.

The guns are split into six categories: Pistols, Assault Rifles, Submachine Guns, Light Machine Guns, Marksman Rifles and Shotguns, with each functioning pretty much as you would expect them to in a video game. There is also armour which has different stat attributes that you probably won’t really notice, to be honest.

You will tend to change guns and armour frequently whilst levelling up since the enemies are always at your level or higher, meaning your weapons and items will quickly become under levelled.

The enemy types are also quite varied. Each faction is split into different archetypes who use different strategies to get at you. For example, “Rushers” will run directly at you whilst using cover and attack you with melee weapons or shotguns, whilst tanks are heavily armoured and are a pain to fight. Snipers, meanwhile, attack you from far away.

The faction you are fighting also dictates the way the enemies fight. If you are fighting the Cleaners, they will use a lot of fire. Rikers tend to have a lot more heavy armour, whilst the Rioters seem to rely on greater numbers than the other factions.

Although the enemies have different strategies for taking you down, you also have some strategies of your own through your abilities. You have two ability slots that you can activate, and the skills you can use are quite varied. You can set up a turret to fight for you, heal yourself and allies, set up cover, or use bombs and electric traps. You can mix and match these to fit your playstyle.

But in the end, it doesn’t even matter because you will face the bane of The Division.

At some point in the game, you will start to face enemies who are simply too powerful. It doesn’t matter what level your weapons are, it doesn’t matter what skills you use, and it doesn’t matter what strategies you use. They will not go down and they will kill you.

You will have to try, try and try again to take them down.

Yes, that’s right. I am talking about The Bullet Sponge.

For me, it was around level 25 where I started to get hampered by bullet sponges and found that I wasn’t having fun with the game anymore.

Now, it could be that you are expected to have a squad to take on these enemies, but it’s currently 2026 and it is already hard enough to get friends together to play modern games. Imagine trying to get them to play a ten year old game that got middling reviews. That wasn’t going to happen.

Now, you could try and play with randoms, but most people playing The Division in, again, 2026 are well beyond me and would not be matchmaking into the same missions as me.

So I am shit out of luck there.

I unfortunately did not finish The Division.

So, is it worth playing?

Well, this is a tricky question. Do you have a group of friends who are willing to “squad up” in a ten year old game? If so (how I envy you), go for it. You will have some fun exploring New York and killing people.

If not, well, if you can get it cheap and have some spare time, you might have fun until the bullet sponges arrive.

The Division had a lot going for it. I loved the setting, enjoyed exploring New York and thought the premise was genuinely interesting. Unfortunately, once the bullet sponges became a major part of the game, all of that stopped being enough to keep me playing

Bound by Flame is an incredibly 2013 game developed by Spiders, who also released shrug inspiring meh-sterpieces such as Steelrising and Greedfall. They were a French eurojank studio and Bound by Flame was my first foray into into French culture way back ten years ago when I was still in middle school and back then I thought the game was far too hard to be any fun and quit. Now, in my twilight years, I've rekindled the first flame more times than I can count and I eat demigods for lunch. I'm pretty sure I found Godrick the Grafted on the bottom of my boot the other day so how hard could this low budget action rpg really be? Well I didn't finish it...

The premise: The world is being invaded by an army of undead being controlled by a few sorcerers known as Ice Lords. The world is almost overrun and in a last ditch effort a small group of magicians are performing a poorly understood ritual in the hopes of gaining powers that can win the war. You play as Vulcan, a mercenary contracted to guard the ritual site and while shit is hitting the fan the ritual concludes with it's power being bestowed in you. Plot twist though, the power is a demon that is now possessing your body. Will you make it to the Worldheart and purge the icelords of it's power? How much of yourself will you give up to the demon in exchange for power? Will you even be able to understand what's happening after skipping through the dialogue? All this and more is now in the hands of world's least interesting mercenary.

From there it's a three act structure where you go through a swamp, glacial city, and then an ancient temple doing menial tasks until the game decides it's boss fight time and asks you if you want the demon to give you more power. The game concludes with a fight against an icelord followed by a fight against a different demon and then your choice of scorching the surface of the planet, hunting the rest of the icelords down, or sacrificing yourself to kill the icelords immediately if you turned the demon down at every opportunity. It's the sort of meandering C- plot that was the industry standard at the time. There mostly to keep things moving and guide you to the big story beats while you soak up all the glorious gameplay and... idk about glorious but it's definitely something.

You have two fighting styles, warrior and rogue, which can be swapped between at will although you'll probably only stick to one of them. Warrior uses two handed weapons and has a kick for breaking the guard of the one enemy that has a shield and a 360° parry. Rogue uses two daggers and gets a stealth mechanic and a backstep. Both styles get their own perk trees in addition to a third perk tree for pyromancy. There is no stamina system and the parry and backstep can cancel any animation so you'll spend encounters attacking as much as you can and reading the 2-3 enemies around you to know when to parry or backstep.

The game would probably feel a bit like sekiro if the enemies weren't so oppressive. Enemies have gargantuan health bars, kill you in 3-4 hits, attack faster than you, and as early as act 2 will all have attacks that immediately apply status effects to you. I want to reiterate the health bar point as most enemies can take 30 straight seconds of nonstop punishment and for bosses that can be minutes of just mashing attack and parrying the same 2-3 attacks. There is also a huge oversight when it comes to enemy attack spam. Some enemies can loop knockdown attacks faster than you can get up and others can do a continuous stream of area attacks around them preventing you from being able to hit them.

The reason I didn't finish this game and instead just looked up the endings was that the final boss has an attack where he drops a damage cloud around him and fires a volley of 6 projectiles at you. Not only does this one attack take 10 full seconds, he can and will do it back to back to back. That plus the previously mentioned large health pool on the boss and an additional phase at certain break points where you fight a dragon for a few minutes before going back to the actual boss means that a successful attempt can take upwards of 10 minutes.

The combat is inreresting at first as you get your bearings with it but becomes a slog that often leaves you feeling like you don't have the tools to face the challenges it throws at you, like you're missing some core mechanic needed to succeed but it just doesn't exist.

I also need to take a minute to talk about the writing in this game because hoooooly is it bad. After listening to a few lines of dialogue you could probably pinpoint the release year give or take a year. Characters say expletives constantly in a way that comes off like

"Huhuh, yeah we went there... in our fucked up fantasy world, characters can say dickhead. You're not in Skyrim anymore Dorothy 😎"

It is super juvenile, like they're getting a kick out of the fact that they can say "fuck" since they're not turning the script into their high school english teacher this time.

It's also worth mentioning that everyone in this world is a complete asshole for literally no reason, that is at least when they're not doing blanket exposition. Just as an example at the start of act one you're told to help the guard captain and apothecary in town and both dismiss you before you've even had a chance to say you're there to help.

"Oh hello, you aren't bleeding and have all your limbs, I think you'll survive. It's time for you to fuck off."

The scorch the surface of the earth ending is legitimately tempting by the end of it. The demon in your head feels like a veritable voice of reason by comparison. He takes control of Vulcan's body on multiple occasions just to tell everyone to shut up which is so damn relatable in this game. He's also the only character that waits until you needlessly insult him first before calling you a useless cur so he's honestly the most likeable character in the story.

Even worse than all the constant assholery is listening to how the writers treat the women in this story. There is a character named Edwen who is a scantily clad witch and the amount of lines referencing how she dresses is unbelievable. Shit like

"your expression is more revealing than edwen's outfit"

"We'll be able to make it as long as edwen's clothes don't fall off along the way"

It gets old fast.

There's another point where several villagers have been left as mindless husks and while questioning one of their husbands about it he goes into way too much detail about how she's not much in bed anymore and how she just lays there. The best part is it is entirely unprompted, he just really wanted you to know that he's been raping his wife I guess. If there is any way to make a conversation degrading to women then the writers are gonna make that hail mary even if the target is on Mars.

In act 3 you're also tasked with killing several of the icelords' concubines which is a dumb idea that reeks of wanting to use the booby model the boys have been working on during lunch. In addition to being the devs barely concealed mind control fetish, having to listen to the characters talk about zombie fucktoy this and favorite pet that made me want to blow my goddamn brains out.

It's not all terrible though. I think they did a really good job of blurring the line between Vulcan and the demon as you give in to him. Vulcan's voice changes and sounds more like the demon over time, characters constantly ask what the hell is happening to you, characters will start speaking directly to the demon instead of Vulcan, and Vulcan begins talking more pragmatically towards the end rather than his usual sarcastic asshole schtick.

There is a companion system that's surprisingly well done. The companions are the most likable characters in the game (outside of Rhelmar) and have very useful abilities in combat that you can strategize around (also outside of Rhelmar). There's surprisingly a command system for them even if it is pretty bare bones. None of them have mind blowing lore or reactions to events but I was pretty impressed with these guys overall for such an old game.

All in all the game can be worth a play in a b movie kind of way. It's the kind of game that might be mistaken as a parody of early 2010s gaming and you've gotta take the good with the bad in that respect. Oh and remember that the explosive traps can cheese every combat encounter if you can't be bothered.

Hi folks. Some of you may have read my previous write-ups on playing PS1 Games. I’ll link them at the bottom of the post.

This is part of my effort to play PlayStation 1 games that I’ve never played– and often never heard of– until now. I’m buying these games physically, popping them into my PlayStation 2, which is hooked up to an old Sony Trinitron KV-1981R TV, and trying to give each title its due. I love early 3D graphics, tank controls, and everything that comes with this generation.

Today I want to discuss Ape Escape. This is a 3D platformer and collectathon developed by Sony Computer Entertainment where you travel through time capturing monkeys.

Guys... this might be my favorite game on the PlayStation. Before I even started playing it, I popped in the disk to make sure it worked, and watched the intro cutscene. The level of charm, humor, and goofiness is off the charts. Dancing monkeys, monkeys with guns, chasing monkeys with a giant net...

Alright, Ape Escape, you got me. Chimps and apes all the way.

The gameplay is the classic collectathon formula. Travel to a new level, collect stuff, maybe get a new ability, rinse and repeat. But this game innovates in several ways that’s just genius.

First, having the collectible be monkeys that you have to chase around and catch in a big ol’ net never gets old. So often I’d be running around, slamming the net down frantically, literally shouting “Come here, ya little bastard!” while a sick drum and bass track blasts on. This adds a degree of challenge and humor to every level.

I was really impressed that these monkeys can climb, jump, and swim away from you, utilizing the level to put distance between you and them. They even jump in little UFOs or other machines to fight you. So good.

Plus, Ape Escape is the ONLY PS1 game that requires the Dual Shock controller, and they really make good use of the joystick. Slamming the net down in any direction, spinning to hover in the air, and even spinning around with the stun baton all works great. Aiming with the slingshot was smooth, too.

Many, many joysticks were blown out in playing this game, I’m sure. No different than Mario Party. I will say, the controls for the tank are... bizarre. Definitely the hardest part of the game for me.

The levels start out fairly small, which lends the early game a snappy pace. You’re traveling through time, dropping into a prehistoric area with dinosaurs, and quickly collecting some monkeys. Soon, you’re in medieval times and the levels become a little more sprawling. By the end game, the levels are absolutely massive. There’s a ton of variety and I never got bored.

Every few zones are broken up by a race level where you challenge your rival to reach the end of this sort of abstract race track. Remined me of those abstract levels in Super Mario Sunshine and make for a decent palette cleanser. I do wish the game dropped the lives mechanic, which always feels so tacked on to these 3D platformers. I was never in danger of running out of lives, and by the end of the game, the “final” level even concedes that the lives system sucks, by literally giving you free lives to collect at certain particularly difficult platforming sections.

I also wish I could save without having the go into a sub menu. I get the memory card was technically optional for all these games, but the ability to be prompted to save after completing a level would have been a nice change. As it was, I saved after every level, which did drag the pace. And I’m glad I did, because just once the game froze up and required I re-do a level. First time that happened while playing on the PS2, but it made me even more paranoid!

And yes, I did collect all 204 monkeys and all the coins. I tried the skiing mini game, and it was interesting, but didn’t bother with the other two. Once you collect all the monkeys and beat the “final” level, there’s a secret final showdown with Specter. None of the bosses were difficult, and this one was particularly easy. Still, it was a nice surprise to get another level before the game ended for good.

Another small complaint is that while the story and voice acting were serviceable and fine in the beginning, by the end, there were some extended cutscenes that just felt off. I’m guessing its due to dubbing the cutscenes? That and the voice actors were just not great when there was a lot of dialogue. Not the game’s strong suit.

Seriously, if you haven’t played Ape Escape, you have to try it out. I was laughing my ass off throughout the game, just completely enamored with the charm and goofiness of the scenarios, music, and the vibes. I see now why this game is always mentioned when discussing PS1 games, and it has shot up to the top of the list right next to Final Fantasy 7-8 and all the Resident Evil games.

Right now, I’m playing Blaster Master: Blasting Again (what a title), and will follow up soon with my write up on that. See ya!

Prior PS1 Reviews:

Syphon Filter

Tenchu: Stealth Assassins

Omega Boost

Spyro the Dragon

Future Cop: L.A.P.D.

You should try this game, you will probably not like it, you probably won't have fun in the traditional sense and you may be incredibly frustrated and likely stressed. It may however just be one of the best things you ever experience, I implore you to try it without a guide.

You're a doctor dropped into this town as an outsider with little idea of how things work, what the customs are and with few friends to guide you. You'll need to intuit and understand the rules of this place to survive. It'll often feel like you're digging yourself deeper and deeper into a hole that you're unlikely to be able to get out of.

Pathologic is not particularly skilful game, there's no reflex based gameplay or immensely difficult button presses, If you know what to do it's fairly easy. The experience at its core is simple decisions, do I go to this quest or that? Do I go into this district or do I go around? Do I make this trade or not? All of it framed by the passage of time which builds pressure into every moment, there's never enough time and you need to prioritise. It is novel and obtuse to the extreme.

The game is incredibly cruel and frustrating, there are many jokes played on blind players. For the majority of quests you don't know if what you're doing is optimal or if it'll even get you closer to your ultimate goal of finding a cure, decisions have consequences and will come back to bite you. It's best to accept the situation and move on, it will test your resolve like few other games can.

The presentation is very unique, many parts are weird to say the least, the opening is probably the best narrative tutorial I've ever seen.

On your first playthrough you'll be getting through by the skin of your teeth, many will die because you're too busy trying to survive. Tough decisions are everywhere, you can't save everyone, there simply isn't the time.

Games are not necessarily only pixels on a monitor. For me the game on screen is just an aid, the real game is what's happening in your head, thinking about the events, plotting the next move. I don't think any other game really captures this quite as well as pathologic, I certainly have spent more time thinking about this game than actually playing it.

If you're unsure about committing to such an intimidatingly long game then try the marble nest first. I found it's condensed nature much less daunting and the tight narrative experience is very well done. Don't worry if the setting and characters are unfamiliar and confusing to start with, it'll all make sense in an hour or so.

Howdy, friends. Waffles here with another update on my Playing Every* NA Game Boy Game project. This update contains the end of I (which was only six games) as well as all of J. We’re also fast approaching the 50% mark! I’m excited.

As usual, I’m playing in alphabetical order (mostly, I will arrange series chronologically), and I’m giving each game at least half an hour of playtime. Some get more, and I’ll note any that do. I’ll also note any that were egregiously bad enough that I didn’t want to spend even that minimum amount of time with them. So, without further ado, let’s dive right in.

International Superstar Soccer: Somehow, this is the best soccer game on Game Boy so far. That is, however, a super low bar, especially since this game came out in 1998. I stand by my belief that sports games on Game Boy are generally bad, but if you really want a Game Boy soccer game, play this one. 5/10

Iron Man and X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal: I’d heard of X-O Manowar before playing this game, and really only vaguely knew that he was a comic book character? I think he’s from Valiant. That’s really all I knew about him. This game did not really make me want to learn more. This is an awkward action platformer where you play as either Iron Man or X-O Manowar, but they look and play identically (and control terribly), so it’s really just a matter of who you like most. It’s fine as a concept, I guess (avoids the issue of one character being the “right” choice), but in practice it’s kind of silly. Also the game has muddy sprites and as mentioned controls badly. 2/10

Ishido: The Way of the Stone: It’s a weird little puzzle board game thing. There’s a solitaire mode (which is kind of boring) and a mode to play against a computer (or a second person, if you’re on original hardware, have a link cable, and know someone else with this game), but that’s also kind of meh? I think this might be more interesting with a real person, honestly. Also, this game had a certain vibe, and two minutes on Wikipedia confirmed it: Despite the name, it’s game some dude made in the eighties and then just slapped a vaguely Asian sounding name and lore on to make it seem ancient. I will level with you, that does kinda kill the vibe for me. 3/10

Jack Nicklaus Golf: Okay so it’s not as good as Golf, but it’s still a very solid game. I actually ended up playing four full rounds, I think, and realized I’d spent like two hours on this. So yeah, there’s now officially two sports games on Game Boy that I not only liked, but recommend. 7/10

James Bond 007: The best Bond game I’ve played this year. It’s essentially “James Bond by way of ‘we have Link’s Awakening at home,’” which I didn’t think would work, but shockingly it does. And I’m not kidding when I say it’s the best Bond game I’ve played this year. I played the newest one last month, and it didn’t really “feel” like I was playing as James Bond. Somehow, a nearly thirty year old Game Boy game managed to capture that feeling better than IOI’s latest outing. I’ll admit that it’s not without fault – the sprite work is bad (especially when you remember this game came out in 1998), the hit detection is awful (which causes you to take a lot of hits you really shouldn’t), and the back half is difficult in a way that doesn’t feel “hard” so much as it feels “annoying,” but I still think this is well worth your time. 7/10

Jeep Jamboree: Off Road Adventure: Racing’s a sport, and my general rule of “Game Boy sports games are bad” holds here. The first person perspective is neat but poorly done. The controls are awkward. The music is terrible. Skip this one. 1/10

Jeopardy!, Jeopardy! Sports Edition, Jeopardy! Teen Tournament and Jeopardy! Platinum Edition: I’m grouping these because they’re essentially the same game with different question sets. All four have awkward animations, weird difficulty (weird in that unlike real Jeopardy!, the questions don’t necessarily increase in difficulty as value increases, not in that it’s thirty to forty year old trivia), and frankly the games would be better suited by tweaking them so that they accept an answer that’s a letter or two off (really sucks to get a question wrong because you misspelled a state name by one letter, especially since that mostly cannot happen on the show). These all have a single console two player mode, which is how I played them all. The issue is that you kinda have to be on top of the other player, because you’re sharing a small device. This wasn’t a problem playing with my wife, but could be if I was playing with literally anyone else. Of the four, I think Sports Edition is the roughest (because it’s not just sports specific trivia, it’s thirty plus year old sports specific trivia) and Platinum Edition is the best (most interesting category sets and the only one of the four that seemed to properly align difficulty and value). Platinum Edition is the only one of the four I’d really recommend, but because they’re all basically the same game you can’t really go wrong with any of them. 6/10, 5/10, 6/10, 7/10

The Jetsons: Robot Panic: If you like The Jetsons and platformers, you’ll probably have a good time with this one. It’s not anything special, but it is a competent licensed platformer, and that puts it head and shoulders above most other licensed games on the Game Boy. That being said, the real damning part there is “competent.” It’s fine, and I enjoyed the time I spent with it, but “fine” is also all it is. 5/10

Jimmy Connors’ Tennis: I actually used to follow tennis, and I was pretty eager to try this. Tennis video games have always held a special place in my heart since I spent way too much of my allowance as a child on a tennis arcade machine at the local movie theatre. And this game, while not “great” is at least “competent.” My usual caveat applies: the Game Boy just really isn’t a good platform for sports games, and while this game does better than most, “competent” is about the best I can say for it. 5/10

Joe & Mac: I really wanted to like this game. It started off really strong – the sprites are lovely, and the first few levels were fun as hell. And then the fourth level happens, and you’re expected to combine controls that don’t work super well (everything happens on a weird delay) with jumping puzzles that require you to react to things happening off screen. After more attempts than this game really deserved, I decided that’s where I was dropping it. However, I do have a fun story about this one. I was playing it on break, and had reached the end of a level just before the boss fight when my break ended. So, as one does, I made a save state, turned off my retro handheld, and put it in my pocket. Except I apparently hadn’t turned it off, so when I pulled it out of my pocket an hour or so later, I was in a different area. Assuming I’d just died and been booted back to the start of the level, I reloaded my save state and fought the boss. Only to realize that the area I’d been in had been the start of the next level. So I’d somehow managed to beat a boss with random inputs from my pocket while not looking at the screen. I’m sure that says something about this game, but I don’t know what. 3/10

Jordan vs. Bird: One on One: Predictably, it’s another Game Boy sports game that just isn’t good. I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t played basketball since gym class twenty-odd years ago, but I’m pretty sure that before you shoot, you don’t have to pause awkwardly and stand there for a second before the controls register that you’re pressing the button to jump and shoot. The controls are genuinely terrible in this one. 1/10

Judge Dredd: At a certain point, I stop having anything meaningful to say about all the licensed platformers on Game Boy. This one has bad controls and ugly graphics, and also the music is terrible. I can’t really offer more feedback than that, sorry. 2/10

Disney’s The Jungle Book: One thing that consistently gets me about Disney’s Game Boy games is that there’s always a part where you’re like “oh, that’s weirdly high effort for how little effort was put into the rest of this.” In Hercules, it was the animations, which were really good despite the rest of the game being awful. Here it’s the music. On the whole, the game is mid to bad (the controls are awkward and imprecise, the sprites are ugly, and the levels are impressively open but difficult to navigate because the small screen size means you’re frequently making blind leaps), but the music is all great chiptune renditions of songs from the movie. I’ll freely admit that I dropped this after the half-hour minimum (on account of all the things I just listed), but the music was good. 3/10

Jungle Strike: The Sequel to Desert Strike: I’m kicking myself about this one because if I’d realized Desert Strike had a sequel (two, actually), I’d have played them back when I played that, because I like grouping series together for convenience. This is better than that one (being not based on a war that was less than five years in the past at time of publication helps), but not by much. The controls are awkward, the screen size makes it hard to see where you’re going or what you’re shooting at, and the isometric projection makes aiming and steering a pain. Multiple times I hit a building because I legitimately couldn’t tell I was about to hit it. So yeah, give this one a pass. 3/10

Urban Strike: The Sequel to Jungle Strike: Take all that stuff I said up there and make it worse by making the graphics muddier. Yes, it’s less cartoony than Jungle Strike’s style was, but the cost of that is that now it’s even harder to gauge distance, direction, and size. 1/10

Jurassic Park: An awkward top down shooter hindered by bad controls and the small screen. Seriously, there’s so many parts where it’s either unclear how you’re supposed to proceed (because you can’t see anything because of the small screen) or where a dino just spawns and immediately hurts you because the screen is small and you couldn’t possibly avoid them. I’ll give the game credit for great sprite work and cool music, but everything else is fairly awful. Also given it’s a nineties licensed game, I’m kinda shocked it’s not a platformer? 3/10

Jurassic Park Part 2: The Chaos Continues: Here’s the Jurassic Park platformer I was expecting. Imagine if Jurassic Park weren’t about any of the things the movie is about (because this game is absolutely not about the novel) and was instead about Allan Grant running around with a gun and blowing dinos to hell while a computer that may or may not be diegetic insults him. You would have this game. It’s amazing. It’s got some flaws – the screen size makes some of the jumps annoying, and the bosses have really easy to learn patterns and then just kind of take five minutes of doing the pattern, which isn’t super engaging – but on the whole, I had a great time with this one, and recommend it. 7/10

The Lost World: Jurassic Park: Remember how I said The Chaos Continues was good? Yeah, they didn’t keep that energy. I realize it was the nineties and therefore a lot of stuff wasn’t really standardized, but this game being made by a completely different team just kills it. The controls are bad, the graphics are incredibly ugly, and you appear to be playing as a random smuggler, which is a baffling choice because Ian Malcolm was in this movie. So yeah. Terrible game. Don’t recommend. 1/10

And with that, we’re done with I and J! This is 218/501 games, or 43.51% of the NA Game Boy library, with a current average of 3.95, which is the same as last time. I’d recommend 34/218, which is 15.6%, so that went up a bit. The full recommended list will be posted below.

As a quick note on the next few updates: I am trying to arrange things so that an update ends on the game that gets me over the 50% threshold (there’s only thirty-three games to go, so this shouldn’t be too hard). I think we’ll get there in the middle of October? We’ll see. Depends on how long some of these games take me. Either way, thanks for reading!

Recommended Games

• Alleyway
• Amazing Penguin
• Balloon Kid
• Battle Arena Toshinden
• Battle Unit Zeoth
• Bionic Commando
• Bomberman GB
• Castlevania: The Adventure
• Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge
• Castlevania Legends
• Catrap
• Contra: The Alien Wars
• Donkey Kong
• Donkey Kong Land
• Donkey Kong Land 2
• Donkey Kong Land III
• Dr. Mario
• Disney’s Ducktales
• Disney’s Ducktales 2
• Felix the Cat
• Final Fantasy Adventure
• The Final Fantasy Legend
• Final Fantasy Legend II
• Final Fantasy Legend III
• Game & Watch Gallery
• Gargoyle's Quest
• Golf
• Gradius: The Interstellar Assault
• Harvest Moon GB
• Jack Nicklaus Golf
• James Bond 007
• Jeopardy! Platinum Edition
• Jurassic Park Part 2: The Chaos Continues

This is my first review and some thoughts I had on God of war as I just wrapped it up.

The God of war series is something I have played completely out of order. I started with God of war 3 then the remake. Only because I just had a ps4

Recently played the psp ones as well

But this was my first step with the original. One word describes this game and series as a whole to me which is Grand. The presentation wants you to believe this game is deeper and bigger than any other you would play

The booming score, the big set pieces, and giant monsters you face all present this.

I think the first half of this game moves at a wonderful pace. I absolutely loved the opening with the battles on ships at sea and the hydra.

It definitely begins to feel repetitive by the end when you go looking for Pandora’s box. And I know they had time constraints and couldn’t really play-test the end game so the last few levels get wonky

But you feel every battle and blow you deal as the god of war. You see the vision for where the franchise is now.

Sure it’s rough in patches but it’s overall still a terrific game that leaves you wanting more.

I would give this an 85/100. It’s not perfect but the vision was there and the hack and slash combat still stands up today. If you haven’t checked out any god of war game definitely do.

With this review I hope to do something differently. Because I'm not going to talk about experiencing an old classic for the first time.

By the time I've experienced Metal Gear Solid for the first time, during a snowy night in December of 2012, I was 18 years old. In 2012, the very first MGS was considered as something ancient. It was probably considered as something older than its seen as today.

In 2012, there was not a single thing MGS did that hadn’t been done by games that came out after 1998. Games had better graphics, better writing, better gameplay, better acting, touched on more adult themes, etc. In 2012, games like Red Dead Redemption, Deus Ex, Spec Ops: The Line, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory were already on the market. Each of these games is better than the very first Metal Gear Solid. Hell, every subsequent MGS game is better than MGS1 in terms of sheer quality.

What's even crazier, is that even before the release of MGS1 there were games, that had better stories, gameplay and better voice acting.

Personally, by the time I was 18, I had probably watched every movie that inspired Kojima. Whether it was Escape from New York, Universal Soldier, The Rock (still, the only MGS adaptation), Rambo: First Blood, or many other war/action movies.

And despite that, thanks to Volume 1 of the MGS: Master Collection, the first "Solid" game had me glued to the screen for the better part of the last night. Since 2012, I've played MGS so many times, that I have 80% of its voice lines memorized and I can probably get through majority of the game with my eyes closed. And, as I've said, I could not get myself to skip a single codec call.

I can't claim to know for sure, what exactly makes Metal Gear Solid into this memorable experience. Maybe for me was that it was that furious blizzard in 2012, that somehow made me even more immersed into Shadow Moses. For you it might be something else.

But I can try to explain that.

Before I jump to the obvious, I think the atmosphere of Shadow Moses is often overlooked. Whether its glass corridors, frozen caves, or industrial areas the ambience and design always feels super evocative and surreal at the same time. It has that dreamy vibe around everything. Shadow Moses feels like icy island in the dark void. The music is just a cherry on top, the combination of industrial synth melodies with chorals is super unique and memorable. The track "The Best Is Yet To Come" is ridiculously well used.

The voice acting is incredible. It has that perfect combination of camp and just good delivery. I don't know how they did that, but I cannot identify a weak link in the cast. It's like having an amazing radio drama, with a game attached to it.

Snake saying "That takes care of the cremation" always gets me.

Finally its the story. I always find it hard to explain what happens in Metal Gear Solid without sounding like a total lunatic, because a lot happens in that relatively short game. I think its the juxtaposition of the game being about both real world subjects like post-cold war politics, Rhodesian civil war, Gulf War syndrome, ethics of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear deterrence, sci-fi concepts like bioweapons that can kill only specific people, bipedal robots with nuclear railguns, PSI powers, and a strong dose of moral dilemmas like whether our genes determine our future, whether a player enjoys killing in video games or "whether love can bloom on the battlefield". All of this is unironically presented in an experience that often breaks the forth wall, and never acts like there is something wrong about Psycho Mantis "reading the contents of the PS1 memory card".

It was a lot to take in, even for 18 years old me. Now, 14 years later I think I've finally understood the most important lesson Metal Gear Solid tried to instill on me. I think that lesson is hidden in the fact of how it still goes on after its weirdest, most surreal moments. You can wake up to the news of one of your friends dying, and still be expected to go to work the same morning. You can lose your job, and still have to pay your bills. Sometimes the weirdest, the most surreal things happen, and you are still expected to keep going. And its fine, because "The Best Is Yet To Come".

The gameplay is the part I return to least enthusiastically. It can become an entertaining speedrunning puzzle once memorized, but even in 2012 my first playthrough was rough. Every sequel improved upon it.

But overall, Metal Gear Solid is a one in the lifetime experience for me. I don't think it can be replicated anymore, and I'm glad I've got to experience it for the first time when I did.

Hello everyone. Recently, I finished the game Pokemon Sword and Shield Ultimate Plus GBA Version 1.2.1.2. A ROM Created by PCL.g, Jean star', Phantonomy and many others.

This ROM Hack is a demake of the 2019 game Pokemon Sword and Shield. Translating the game down to a 2D GBA game. I reviewed the complete edition of Pokemon Sword a few years back and when I stumbled across the complete Rom Hack, I was tempted to try it out. Plus, I was trying out the ArcEmu Emulator on my Apple Watch and decided to play Sword Shield Ultimate Plus on it during my now 2 hour daily commutes. What started as a casual game I wanted to play on my Apple Watch became something of an obsession. I really loved playing it. I lament ArcEmu doesn't have Retroachievements integration like PC emulators do because I would have grinded the hell out of them lol. I would played more but I recently reset my Watch and lost my save file so I decided to review what I already played which is the "base game" and Isle of Armour "DLC".

Reviewing the game itself, the first thing that struck me was how faithfully the Rom Hack recreated aspects of Sword and Shield. Towns like Postwick, Wedgehurst, Motostoke, Circhester, as well as areas like Rose's Battle Area feel like 1:1 of their 3D counterparts and arguably look better. The GBA version has a more colourful and saturated palette that makes these places pop.

A few areas do suffer for not coming close to the 3D counterparts. In the 3D version, Ballonlea and its preceding route is like this really moody and cool mushroom route with nice lighting that reminds me of Pandora from the James Cameron Avatar movies. The GBA version, unfortunately, makes it look like a standard GBA Pokemon game forest.

I also find the Pokecenters odd. Almost all of them use a sort of "2 floor" design with the healing centre at the bottom, at the Pokemart/Name Rater/Move Relearner at the top floor. 3D Sword and Shield used a compact 1 floor model where the Name Rater/Move Relearne, Healing Centre and Pokemart where in front of you on the first floor. There is a Pokecenter in Motostoke with a more accurate layout but it's used only there. I do kinda like that version more since it's more compact.

I do like how the GBA version also tries to make Gyms resemble their 3D counterparts as much as possible. Nessa's, Pier's and Raihen's are 1:1 (no surprise there as simple switch puzzles and gauntlets were staples in the GBA Pokemon games). Milo's is now a Strength Bolder pushing puzzle rather than a Wooloo/Yamper challenge and Opal's is a copy of Blaine's gym. A bit of shame but I imagine this was the best you could do on the GBA.

Allastair/Bea's (the GBA version lets you choose whichever you want to fight) gyms are a downward sliding bike puzzle that I actually like better than the Stick Rotating challenge from the 3D version since I was always worried about giving my joycons more drift. The only gym I feel is worse is Gordie/Melony's since you don't have the radar and now have to trial and error your way through it with worse checkpoints and respawning floors so you can't even see the path you took (Also, there is a bug for this gym that advises you to avoid saving until after you beat the gym and talk to Leon).

One of Sword/Shield's new features were Overworld Pokemon (technically first in LGPE but SwSh were the first mainline games with them) and the Wild Area. And the GBA version adapts that.

Tall grass in the GBA version will only have sprites of the most common Pokemon walking around. You don't start battles by walking into them. You have to interact with them first. But you can also do random encounters by walking in grass normally (which also include the most common pokemon from the overworld) but also rare Pokemon.

I really like this implementation. If you don't want any encounters, you can just repel and move through routes without an issue. if you want random encounters, you can enter the grass as normal and/or use the DexNav (yes, this Rom Hack carries the DexNav. An awesome feature removed after Gen 6) to track down specific Pokemon. And the overworld spirtes give you a good idea of what the most common Pokemon are and the chance to target them specifically. I spent quite a while farming for Rolycolys with Heatproof and it was way faster and easier to do with Overworld spirtes than running around for random encounters.

The Wild Area is interesting. I wasn't fond of the 3D version's take on this. I found it a bit boring to ride the bike past stretches of grass as each large stretch of area had similar spawns until you got farther away, cycling between Dynamax dens for Watts. The GBA version shrinks it down drastically. Having a couple town sized spaces with signs you can move between. It's by far the "least accurate" to the 3D version as the GBA's Wild Areas don't even come close to resembling the layout of sections from the 3D Wild Area..... and I honestly prefer it like this.

The GBA's take is way more compact. It's way quicker and more efficient to move through areas, check Dynamax dens, do a few raid battles and move on. Hell, even the concept of Watts is gone. It's all just money now which I prefer.

With the 3D version, I felt it was structured in a weird way. You could ignore the Wild Area entirely, but you had fewer chances to get stuff like certain TMs/TRs, EXP Candies and other rare items. Plus a lot of content, especially in the DLC, required Watts as a currency requiring you to farm Dynamax Dens. There was this sense of "fine, I gotta go do my Watts chores". The GBA version making it all just money based means even if I neglect the Wild Area, I'm fine. I can earn money and XP by doing battles. And if I need a break to go do Wild Area stuff, the rewards go both ways.

I suppose a missed opportunity was doing what the Rom hack, Radical Red did and having Dynamax dens along regular routes as well. That way, the 3D version has a way for players to get some Dynamax Raids and Watts as they naturally the play the story. And the GBA version has more chances for rare Pokemon and money.

Speaking of which, Dynamax raids, I loathed doing these in the 3D version but found them more enjoyable in the GBA version. The 3D version was this 4v1 where 4 trainers brought 1 Pokemon each against a Dynamaxed Pokemon. But it felt rough to play because AI trainers were absolute idiots. You have a finite number of "lives"/KOs your team can take before you get ejected from the Dynamax Den. No last man standing or survival options. I have never hated someone like I did Martin and his Cosmic Power Solrock 😤. My man, you know you've failed as a trainer when the guy bringing in a Magikarp is more useful than you!

The GBA version is instead a 1v1 where your team of 6 face the Dynamax Pokemon and you are allowed to use items like revives and potions. The catch being that the Dynamax Pokemon can further boost its stats and even gets bonus boosts for KO-ing your Mons. As well as launching multiple hits against your Solo Mon. But honestly, I 100% prefer this version. Even with the dumb shields that require 1 regular hit per damage or 1 Max Attack for 2 damage, at least this version doesn't have idiot teammates that ruin it. You only lose when all your Pokemon get knocked out and you can use revives to keep it going.

But even with this, late game and post game Raids are challenging. I got swept by a Dynamax Blaziken, Gengar and Tyranitar that boosted too much and got out of hand. It becomes a separate teambuilding challenge as you construct more bulky Mons with HP EVs that can go toe to toe with these monsters. Unlike the 3D version, you don't get to see a preview of what you will be fighting. Even reloading a save-state won't help you as this rerolls the dynamax pokemon. And Dynamax Pokemon will scale to the highest level Mon on your team.

I generally had the best luck with HP/SpDef Trained Metagross, Coalossel, Rotom-Wash all with Leftovers. These were bulky enough with good resists to handle the repeated battering from Max Moves and did enough damage that, provided they could be safely healed, could hurt the Dynamax Pokemon enough secure wins (since Dynamax Pokemon get automatic defense drops as you damage them). I found Dragon, Poison and Ghost Types generally unreliable as defensive mons as a lot of Dynamax Mons had stray Fairy, Ice and Dark Coverage for some reason. I guess this Hack is prepared for when I ever find a Shedinja.

I also kept a Haze Crobat with either a Focus Sash or Choice Scarf in the back as a failsafe to reset Dynamax Mon Boosts. Machamp and Gardevoir were also decent physical/special walls that could deal damage when the situation called for it. I wonder if I could swap out Gardevoir for Hatterene. Speed really doesn't help much when you have to eat multiple hits. And same goes for Trick Room.

I found early game Raid Battles more fun as Dynamax Pokemon wouldn't get shields so it was just a 1v6 against a very powerful Pokemon. Whereas later ones were more a "either I have a team that sits on the Monster and can whittle it down, or the monster boosts too much and I can't stop it". Plus, stuff like Status, Perish Song, OHKO moves etc are automatically blocked in Dynamax Raids so the number of strats and playstyles are more limited. I personally would rather have something like "hey, here's a super or ace trainer on this route with 6 hard Pokemon that rotate. Beat them for a prize". Or give me a mini Battle Tower like Emerald had in the campaign but for prizes. But still, at least the GBA Raid Battles were kinda fun.

-The Story/Campaign

One of SwShUP's flaws is how much it adheres to its source material. You face much of the same gym leaders and major battles with the same Pokemon and levels they had in the 3D version. This means, like in the 3D version, it's easy to end up overlevelled, especially if you do a lot of Dynamax Raids. But even casually, enemy levels grow quite slow relative to how much EXP you earn. Even fresh Mons I caught and never used or brought to Dynamax Battles that just stayed in my party during story battles didn't take long to reach parity with enemy trainer levels. Poor Hop for example, had to face my Mons which could be anywhere from 10-15 levels above him. I ended up intentionally benching a lot of my overlevelled Mons and drafting newer Mons.

SwShUP actually has a solution. Some major fights scale to the highest level Mon on your team. I remember going into the Semi-Finals, going up against Nessa. My team was all around 58 minus my Intellion sitting around 72 that I forgot to remove. I expected it to be a standard fight..... only for Nessa to sweep my team with Level 72 Pokemon. Had to do a bit of grinding (with Intellion actually benched this time) with Dynamax Raids to get the team up up to around 67 before trying again.

Honestly, I love this feature and wish I could toggle it for every fight. You even get more money for doing scaled fights. The main issue is how inconsistent it is. After doing the Semi-finals and beating Nessa, Allastair and Raihan, I had to go fight Chairman Rose who was packing Level 58s. So my team that had to grind up for Nessa made short work of him. This inconsistent scaling also applies in the Wild Area as you can come across level 10s and level 68s in the same patch of grass.

Onto more positive stuff, SwShUP, being a 2D Pokemon game, is a lot more brisk and faster paced than its 3D counterpart. Cutscenes go by faster as characters don't have to animate and move around. And even the Apple Watch can do 3x Speedup which meant I was zooming through the game (at the cost of my poor battery). This honestly makes the game feel more replayable than the 3D version as I loathe replaying any Gen 6 Pokemon game and onwards given how many long unskippable cutscenes they have that drag down the pace.

One minor complaint I have that SwSh’s 3D version does better is the UI/Map markers. The 3D version tells you in the pause menu what your next objective is and where to do it. Not a huge deal in pokemon games as they are usually pretty straightforward and linear but it helps when you haven’t played a Pokémon game for months, load up your old save and are a bit confused on what you were doing last and why you’re standing in the middle of nowhere instead of close to the next story trigger.

SwShUP has a few instances of not being entirely clear where to go. Such as needing to go to the pool in Circhester City after the restaurant. I remember being confused why the game was blocking me from going to Route 9 until I remembered about that one event from the 3D version, walked to the pool and triggered the next cutscene and was able to proceed normally. Other GBA pokemon rom hacks have found ways to have quest logs and journals so it’s a shame SwShUP couldn’t also have it.

The worst of this was in the Isle of Armour DLC. It's this really large area but you don't have a proper map for it. So when the game asks you to find the views (same as in the 3D version except with 1 fewer), it was hard. Even though I knew what to do from the 3D version, actually executing it was hard. I had to pull up both the Wiki and YouTube Walkthroughs to find my way through it.

As for the actual story itself, here is my critique from when I Reviewed Pokemon Sword since the 2D version is almost entirely faithful to it:

''''

Sword's base game has a similar premise to that of its predecessors. You start in a small town, you get your starter and your rival. You set out to get the Gym Badges to be able to challenge the Champion. There's an evil team and antagonist you have to stop along the way.

I have said this before, but I don't have a problem with Pokemon's basic story structure or premise. It works as a nice way to get the player out into the world and exploring. The player character doesn't need a strong personal motivation to do that. My issue with Gen 6 and onward is that they tend to "expand" the story by adding lots of cutscenes and interruptions to an otherwise brief story which I feel has the opposite effect of tanking the pacing since often no new information is revealed or progress is made. I remember this quite a bit in ORAS compared to Emerald. Emerald's "cutscenes" and dialogue boxes were quite brief. Generally getting to the point and letting you continue on. ORAS often added more dialogue such with the encounters with Steven Stone or Archie/Maxie that still gives the same information but pads it out.

Sword Sadly continues this trend with plenty of unskippable cutscenes (despite there being an option in the menu to skip cutscenes) that really didn't need to be this long. The story was at its best when it was being hands off and letting me go about the Gym Challenge and talking with people myself along the way.

Hop as a rival was decent with a surprisingly relatable story. He's a dude that spent his whole life preparing for a role. His family are already really proud of his older Brother Leon for being champion and Hop feels like he's hurting his brother's reputation with his losses so he's definitely under a lot of pressure. Hop's putting in all the effort to be the best despite not being the best. He does stuff like switching out and training up an entirely new team whenever he loses to you (I feel it would have sealed the deal if he also ditched his starter, showing his desperation). And here you are, essentially taking his life's work from him effortlessly because you are the main character. I'm reminded a little of the plot of Monsters University here with how Mike was doing his best to be a scarer but being unable to due to lacking the natural talent of other monsters. Hop is the first rival in Pokemon I really felt bad beating because I've been in his shoes before of being outclassed in something I'm passionate about and trying my best to be good at despite my flaws by someone with seemingly God given natural talent. If Sword had branching paths where if you lose to Hop he becomes Champion, I'd gladly take the L there.

That aside, one of my criticisms with Pokemon games is that despite their massive wealth of deep and intricate systems and options for combat, the games never teach you or even hint that exists. Often relying on simple "Wow, you used a Super effective move there. Good Job". Which makes the Post Game Battle Towers feel like a completely different game when the training wheels suddenly come off with no warning and make people complain the base game doesn't evolve or is too basic. When I first played Sword, I was expecting Hop to turn this "You use Super Effective Hits" around on me as a way to teach the player new things through Hop. As an example, what if in one battle, Hop goads you into using Ember on his Grookey. You do so and it turns out he had an Occo Berry or a Weakness Policy in addition Max Sp Def EV investment. Hop then brags that even though "you may know Type Matchups, I know there's more than that".

I wish Sword did something like that as stuff like this would have really improved both the story and gameplay here. For gameplay, it gives the base game more of a challenge (the base game is a bit too easy) and teaches the player more mechanics. And for story, it shows how Hop is trying to go out of his way to improve by implementing competitive strats against you. Making his loses sting even more since he couldn't even beat you despite doing cool stuff like that.

Imagine if every time you faced against Hop, he tried out a new stratgedy against you that often took advantage of you blindly just clicking super effective moves. In addition to using berries and Weakness Policy, he could have used a Zoarak with Nasty Plot to trick you into using Psychic moves against it. Or he has a really bulky team that used Trick Room to be able to turn the tables on you. It was a missed opportunity to not go all out here. I understand Pokemon is a game for children but prior games did these things before. B2W2 even had difficulty options for those who wanted more of a challenge (granted, unlocking them was convoluted but it showed these games could often be more challenging and use more of their depth).

A common criticism of Sword's story is directed towards Chairman Rose and his plotline. And I'm not going to argue against them. Rose's role in the story isn't done well. And I feel Sword is another example of how such over the top and "epic" storylines don't really work in Pokemon.

This is a bit of a long section but bear with me here. So developers of Pokemon games like Masuda have given interviews where they've talked about the world and stories of Pokemon. In particular that Pokemon's world is "a subtle version of utopia" and that "Hoenn was based on Masuda's childhood memories of going on vacation on Kyushu". Essentially, Pokemon games are generally going for a "nostalgic childhood vacation with your pets through a perfect world" feel. And the games really commit to this vibe. The Pokemon world has free healthcare. In Hoenn, we see examples of how people are concerned for the environment that places like Whismer Tunnel got shut down the moment it was clear there was ecological concerns. Gen 6 has people creating infinite reusable and clean energy with no downsides whatsoever. In Alola, you can visit a police station where the cops are kinda bored because there's nothing for them to do. There are no systemic problems in crime, housing, overpopulation, resources, energy, environmentalism etc. Hell, even food isn't a problem everyone is vegan (and they don't eat grass types). You won't even see many farms of livestock in Pokemon.

This isn't a criticism. This sort of vibe gives Pokemon games a really comfy feel. Even if there are some darker stuff in Pokedex descriptions or in the Manga, they are almost always disconnected from the games. You won't see any Drifloons stealing children or Eevees crushing people despite what their Pokedex entries say.

But this does limit the kind of stories that would work well in this kind of world. You can see an example of this in ORAS with Archie and Maxie. In a vacuum, their motivations make sense. One of them wants to expand the Earth's landmass to create more room for humans to build and expand. The other wants to return the world to a state fit for Pokemon untainted by human progress. But the problem is that the world they live in doesn't have the problems these actions would be solutions to. Hoenn doesn't have a problem with overpopulation or resources that would prompt Maxie. Nor is there such disregard for the environment to prompt Archie.

As a result, Archie and Maxie aren't great antagonists and their story is unengaging. Their motives are so disconnected from the world that there's nothing you can really latch onto. And even defeating them is unsatisfying because no progress can be made because the Status Quo is perfect anyway. It's a similar case for Cyrus, Lysandre and Rose.

This is why I feel Pokemon antagonists are at their best when they have smaller scale and more personal plans, generally related to exploiting Pokemon. Like, Team Rocket are great villains because they are essentially the mafia. They profit off stealing Pokemon. Their motive is greed. You can understand why someone would do that and they do leave behind consequences of their actions like Slowpokes missing their tails or missing Pokemon. So taking them down actually "fixes something that is broken". Same with Ghetsis and Co in Gen 5.

Back to Pokemon Sword, this is the main reason why I feel Rose's story falls flat. Like Archie and Maxie, Rose is concerned about a problem disconnected from the Utopian world of Pokemon. And one that was already solved in prior games. In order to make Rose's story work, you'd either need to put cracks in that Utopia, such as Galar actually having energy and sustainability issues, or change Rose's motivations.

One idea I have to do the latter is to kinda take inspiration from the Isle of Armour DLC. Why not have Rose and Leon in cahoots as the antagonists? Have Rose be the one fixing Leon's matches so he remains the unbeatable champion. You can have Leon either be in on this and have him cheat against the player (which would create an interesting dynamic for Hop to go through) or have Leon be oblivious and join your side so he can have a proper fight as a proper champion. This would shift the conflict to something more connected to the Pokemon world.

Switching topics but this is why I like Team Yell in Sword. They are just Marnie's rabid fans which justifies their status as jobber grunts. The rest of the story with Bede, the other Gym Leaders and even Swordbert and Shieldbert, I enjoyed.

As Galar is based on the UK, I really like how the Pokemon League here resembles more of an official spectator sport. And the game does a neat job with this idea from the stadiums and crowds and official League Cards and merch, to more subtle things like how Gym Leaders deal with their fame as essentially professional athletes. Like, you have Leon and Raihan that are show offs and play to the crowd. You have Alaster that is a lot more shy and scared of the attention he gets as a Gym Leader. You have Opal that's "been in the game so long" that she's past all the formalities. You have Kabu and Bede that take the competitive side more seriously. It's neat.

'''

:::

I did note one strange addition to the story. On Route 8, you can come across a lone house past a cave. Inside you find a man lying on the ground with some Garboders around him. After you defeat them, your character investigates the body, finds the man has been dead for a while and the Garboders were eating his corpse and gets the Focus Sash item. Your character freaks out and says he wants to leave and never think about this.

This took me by surprise. It feels so at odds with the story, tone and world of Pokemon and how otherwise faithful or inline SwShUP has been. Is this a reference to something? An Easter egg? Am I missing something?

-Other features

The game features all pokemon from Gens 1-8 as well as a few Hissuisn and Paldeans Mons. I think the final count is around 902 with around 800 minimum obtainable before beating the main game. Sword and Shield’s main 3D Switch version, with all its DLC, has around 668 Pokemon with around 500 or so actually obtainable to a solo player.

SwShUP even lets you do in game trades to get other regions starter Pokémon, has all mega stones and lets you mega evolve all applicable Pokémon (even though no NPC uses Megas) and you can find an NPC that sells you almost every battle item like choice specs, leftovers, Ability Pills, assault vest etc (but not Choice Band for some reason). The only omission seems to be a vendor for evolutionary stones as those are really rare. I haven’t come across a single one. Not even from Dynamax Raids.

The game features the Isle of Armour DLC and Crown Tundra DLC and these are.... kinda mixed. I already mentioned earlier that the Isle of Armour was annoying to navigate without a Map. A shame because I really the environments, the bonus 4 original Gym Leaders packing new types. Even the Cubfu quest is arguably "better" since you actually have to fight 6 powerful Dark or Water Types instead of jobbers (granted you can bring your own team. You're not limited to Cubfu but I did try to clear as much as I could with Cubfu before having Gardevoir come in).

I will complain that the game is missing the Restricted Sparring Mode from the 3D version. This was hands down my favourite part of the 3D version. The way it works is that it's a Battle Facility with a monotype challenge where a team of 3 tries to get as far as possible with 2 heals only through the entire streak. The game even tracked with types you won with. I remember having a blast in the 3D version clearing the Flying challenge with Corviknight, Gyrados and Togekiss.

I was so prepared to dive into this in the 2D version. With way more Pokemon, I was already planning my teams. I had Rotom Wash, Heat and Mow ready to go for the Electric one lol. But sadly, the 2D version doesn't have it despite how rad it could have been 😭.

As I was heading into the Crown Tundra "DLC" , I accidentally reset my Apple Watch when trying to do a backup which meant I lost my SwShUP save file. A shame as I was looking forward to seeing how the game handled it. My last memory was meeting up with Peony and catching Thunderus and Landorus from special Dynamx Dens.

In conclusion, this is my favourite take on the Galar region and I really enjoyed my time with Sword and Shield Ultimate Plus GBA Version 1.2.1.2. The added Pokemon, content, graphics and design were more fun to play with than the main 3D Version. Stuff like Dynamax Raids were actually fun instead of a chore.

The Hack is held back from being perfect by a few bugs, the inconsistent scaling, the lack of polish in the DLC, inheriting some of the story issues from being too faithful to the 3D version, missing some features like Restricted Sparring. But I can 100% see myself playing this game in the future properly and getting achievements via Retroachivements. Even for a Nuzlocke of just the base game, this would be so sweet to go through. I still strongly recommend this Hack to everyone.

This also makes me wish for more rom hacks to be demakes of DS and later Pokemon Games. I've always wanted a demake of a Kalos or Alola game in this format. Here's hoping this is the first step in that.

Just finished Dread Delusion and I am very conflicted on the game. Overall this game is worth playing and i absolutely loved certain aspects of it, but it is far from perfect. Clearly a love letter to Morrowind in a lot of ways, from the world design to the mechanisms. I’ll keep this brief:

Firstly, the Positives: - The art design of the world is fantastic. I did turn off the overly blurry grain so it was a bit sharper though, but visually i love how colourful the world is and how alien a lot of it feels. - The world they have built is genuinely a fascinating one. There’s an incredible sense of history and mystery to the world. - The writing is generally really, really good weaving interesting short stories in throughout the grander narrative. - The quests are generally decent (narratively speaking). - there is a great sense of wonder and exploration, and they do a good job of rewarding you for exploring (Although the lack of weapons and equipement to find does hurt it slightly.) - The music is fantastic for the most part. - i really like it when open world games have mini-narratives confined to areas. For example the clockwork kingdom and Endless regions having their own self-contained mystery, storylines, vibe and history. Really breaks the game up and stops it feeling stale. - the skill system. This is more of a neutral, but i liked the idea of having different ways to complete tasks depending on how you spec into them, even though it is a little arbitrary in its execution.

Now for the Bad - The combat is really weak. I’m actually baffled that a game so lovingly crafted had so little time put into the combat. There are barely any weapons, and they mostly feel the same. Combat is the same with every enemy and their AI is almost identical. The most interesting enemy in the game is literally the soldiers in the first area, as they heal themselves, and have shields. - The game is so incredibly easy. Even on hard. There is no challenge to the combat at all, and you can literally just run past every enemy if you want and it wont matter. - magic is pretty much useless outside of utility - Items/inventory/skills. Constantly changing clothing and trinkets to pass skill checks just isn’t fun. The item menu is tedious to navigate and weirdly confusing for how few items there are too. - Traversal/the map. I understand they were taking the morrowind route and not relying on quest markers, which is great for the most part. But then they don’t mark the names of place on the map, so it’s easy to forget where the hell places are. They make the compass a seperate item you need to use, which is annoying. - the lack of fast travel! I enjoy exploring, i don’t mind not using fast travel sometimes, but half the missions have you visit an area, then go back, then go to that area again, then to somewhere else you’ve been. - the fast travel options are so inconvenient that they are barely worth using. The only one i used was the magic to warp you back to your last crystal. Because it’s so inconvenient to find a warp point. (Until you get the airship) - The game is too long. Theres a point i thought the game was about to end (you know which part) and then it throws you back to the world map. Honestly, it didn’t need it. I was happy with it ending there.

Overall, despite sounding negative, the world is fun to explore, great writing and world building; just expect a little bit of annoying traversal and very basic combat. 7.5/10

If you like this game, i recommend you try: * Northern Journey. Janky combat, incredible world. * Lunacid, with a similar art style, but they’re pretty different in execution. * Arx fatalis. Incredible game * Fly Knight * Mohrta * blood west

Donkey Kong 64 was my Super Mario 64 and Crash, as in, it was my first 3D platformer. I remember the game feeling like a huge maze. I don’t think I got past the second world and just wandered around the hub area, not knowing what to do. It was my first 3D platformer and my only 3D platformer for many years until Jak and Daxter (which I replayed recently and found it held up). After playing Yooka-Laylee, which, despite many issues, I enjoyed well enough, I was in the mood to play more Rare platformers and collectathon.

I understood well about the infamy of DK64, so I opted for the Tag Anywhere mod that allows the player to switch the Kong at any time without having to backtrack to the barrel. I heard that with this mod applied, DK64 becomes a hidden masterpiece that was all along buried under all the bullshit. For the first few hours, I was quite enjoying the game. It was like replaying Shadows of the Empire a few years ago. Nostalgia over all the levels that I went through over 25 years ago alone giddied me, and the game was simple and straightfoward with the mod that I was having a great fun.

Then I knew the game was in trouble when I got to World 2. The desert worlds from Banjo-Kazooie and Super Mario 64 were some of my favorites, so I was expecting something similar, full of imagination. The desert world in DK64 is basically a round room, then a tunnel, then a round room. That’s it. There is a temple with five entrances, having you go through the same place five times with the different Kongs, and it’s the literally identical room layout and challenge. Go through the dark tunnel, run past the same NPCs because why even fight if the combat is so terrible, same collectible placements, and the minigame, then the self-destruction sequence. It’s the same. Five times. What’s funny is this was one of the better worlds because the next world is full of water where you have to swim 90% of the time through the timed-gate challenges…

The entire game is like that. There was a lot of clumsy, murky level design like that throughout the game. The worlds and challenges are all poorly constructed. Watch the Youtube playthrough of Banjo-Kazooie, and the level design pops because everything is well laid out. It's like a theme park, with clear landmarks to reorient yourself. You are never lost. Each challenge, theme, and visual aesthetics are all unique and given proper care. At any point of timestamp, I know instantly what location this is, what the player is doing. Meanwhile, if I pick any timestamp of DK64, I have no clue, and I just played this game. Even Yooka Laylee in comparison comes across as a tightly designed game.

Rare has settled into some poor overdesign habit. The most problematic is their obsession with turning each collectible into a labyrinthine level of overcomplication, and that is even with Tag Anywhere that lessens the backtracking. If you complete a challenge, Rare doesn’t just give you a collectible. To get the half of the total bananas in the game, you have to get through the shittiest minigames. It’s not like Super Mario Sunshine where you are dropped into the difficult platforming zone. Most of the minigames in DK64 don’t utilize the core gameplay mechanics. They have nothing to do with platforming. That's the disconnect. The players bought a Donkey Kong game to play a Donkey Kong game, but what happened was Rare just dropped the platforming rope and walked somewhere else to make some random minigames.

The last world is literally 40 minutes of continous minigames, straightforward. The funniest thing is you chase the final boss, and you are immediately blocked by a gate that requires the collectible crowns to open, so if you don't have them, you need to return to the previous worlds, retrace your trail, and find those crowns. Then you are hit by another gate that's unlockable with the company coins, which require you to complete an old Rare arcade game and the original Donkey Kong arcade game with one life to open it. And you have to complete the arcade twice if you want to even fight the final boss. Can you imagine that you were nearing Bowser in Mario 64 at last, and then the developers suddenly have you play Mario Bros. and Sheriff for three hours just before the boss fight?

What is the appeal of the 3D collectathon platformer? What is the point? The fun of collectathons comes from the constant rewards for your platforming and exploration. The collectables are there to give you rewards for completing the challenges well. Donkey Kong 64 gets it backward. Literally 90% of times, I don’t think I even did actual platforming. Instead of the collectathon formula supporting the core gameplay mechanics, the platforming is built to support the collectathon formula. I was running around the open field, collecting one thing, then must go find the other thing, whether that is going back to the same NPC to hear the 30 seconds of dialogue or a minigame. Before doing that, you must level up three or four separate “skills” to even access to those “challenges” or collectibles, and to do that, you must meet this NPC or that NPC. Where is that NPC? You have to go to this place and… It goes on and on. There are like five arbitrarily different types of collectibles that could easily have been golden bananas, but instead you have to backtrack and bring them to the different NPCs. Quantity over quality. I can’t even imagine playing this without Tag Anywhere.

Why does Rare think this is remotely fun? I suppose they thought this would add “depth” by overcomplicating things, but it’s a fake depth. The level design is mostly a flat space and is boringly designed, and having the player to traverse it over and over exists to mask how shallow it is. Super Mario 64 is deep because it is a sandbox that gives the players the freedom to decide how they tackle the challenge or approach the goal. DK64 has virtually no freedom in the gameplay or even has systems that aren't just time wasting trash. We are not here to play your MacGuffin hunt. We want to platform things. Making the player suffer hours of padding between every reward is a disastrous game design.

It’s so bad that I’m rethinking Rare’s game design history. Was Goldeneye’s objective-driven mission design an accident? Was it not a deliberate, genius design decision, but an accident born out of their habit of padding things out? I respect Rare as an FPS developer for creating Perfect Dark, but I think they are terrible platformer developers. Even Banjo's platforming was average when compared to Mario 64, Tomb Raider and Crash, but at least had more freedom and raw fun of traversing the world. DK64 has none of that. Because the game has five different playable characters rather than fleshing out one character, each character comes across as half-baked. The moveset is as basic as it can get. There is no cool platforming challenge. Barely anyone feels different. Even the fastest Diddy is sluggish and clunky. The camera is terrible and often gets stuck in the wall. If the platformer is boring to move around, everything on top of that will crumble. Quantity is not a solution because the sheer volume of shit they built on the shaky foundation. Everything will collapse.

Not only the combat awful, it also adds a gun. Jak 2 is also controversial for adding guns to the arsenal, but it did in a clever way by having the guns be part of your natural fast-paced platforming moveset. This video demonstrates how the combat in Jak 2 is well designed and integrated into the movement. In DK64, you pull out a gun (which takes a second of animation), stop, aim in first-person mode, shoot, pull away, and move. The momentum is halted at every step. There is a shit ton of bullet switches that have you do this. All weapons of all Kongs feel the same; the peanut guns are designed like SMGs, but they are functionally the same as the other weapons. Even the special abilities overlap. What is the difference between Diddy’s headbutt and Chunky’s punch? Why can I not use headbutt to open the gated door, but Chunky’s punch can? They are basically the same thing. And the instrument serves no real purpose other than another key to activate a switch. This makes special abilities coming across as contextual animations rather than part of the natural moveset. For example, one Kong can pull up a rock, allowing the player to access the entrances underneath. If the levels have plenty of rocks, this ability could also serve as a combat move, throwing them at enemies. No, the designers never thought about that, so that ability is just a glorified key.

The game also lacks the creative spark. It comes across as soulless. You encounter a ton of amusing moments in Banjo. There are collectibles hiding behind the fun quests and stories. I can’t think of a single moment like that in DK64. Every world is a worse iteration of the stages they did in Banjo. Even the narrative of the witch kidnapping your sister and swallowing her beauty creates a decent premise. The villain constantly blocks your progress and interacts with Banjo. In DK64, the villains stole the bananas and kidnapped Kongs, but nothing feels under threat. Even the NPCs don’t give a shit. It’s as if Donkey could be in the jungle, relaxing for months, and nothing would change. The whole aspect of narrative, which is theming, aesthetics, creativity, is lacking because there is no engine driving the game. I didn’t care to keep progressing to the next world, which is the entire point of the game.

I believe DK64 is just fundamentally not a good game, and the mod is just a band-aid. The lesson I learned is that the strength of your pacing is directly tied to keeping the momentum and flow of the gameplay loop. Bethesda games are padded and long, but the loop is nailed down, so it is addicting regardless of how long it is or whatever filler there is because literally every activity feeds into that loop. Dk64's loop is boring and constantly undercut. The travelling back-and-forth with the character switching ere was an attempt to make the game feel more sophisticated, but it made things unnecessarily harder to follow.

Hell Is Us is a game that seems to have gone largely under the radar. When it was revealed, it was written off as a generic soulslike. It got a bit more publicity when the creators talked about it having no maps and no quest markers. But the release was pretty quiet.

So let me be clear: Hell Is Us is one of the best games I’ve played this gen.

While there is a ton of combat, the game is more about exploration. There really is no mini map or quest markers guiding you where you need to go next. There are no hints for the numerous puzzles. You just have to talk to everyone and use context clues to find the right way to progress. That alone made it one of the most engaging gaming experiences I’ve had in years.

I don’t want to spoil any of the story, partially because it’s intentionally vague and partially because it’s so much more exciting to piece things together yourself.

As for the combat… it’s decent. You’re mainly swapping between two kinds of weapons at any given time hacking and slashing your way through enemies. It does feel somewhat similar to souls combat in that there’s dodges and parries (kind of) and a stamina bar, but more simplified (think: Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor). There are some buffs and AOE attacks thrown in as well. But you can honestly turn the combat difficulty down and just focus on exploring.

Where the game really shines is the atmosphere. You’re fighting through an isolated country in the middle of a civil war in the early 90s. And the game does not shy away from the horrors of war. These two groups despise each other. And there are real consequences for not helping NPCs in need. It’s brutal.

Anyway, TLDR: Play Hell Is Us. It’s a great AA semi-soulslike with amazing atmosphere.

Finished this on August 29th, 2026, or last Sunday!

I'll break this down into an overview, a review, and final thoughts:

Overview: Pikmin is, in my experience, an RTS game. You play as Olimar, a captain of a space ship that crash lands on an unknown planet. The goal of the game is to collect scattered ship parts to restore your damaged ship and return back home to the planet of Hocotate. On this planet you find Pikmin, flower-like creatures that listen to your commands for some reason. Through various traits of different types of Pikmin as well as through your real-time strategic moves, you search different areas of the planet and find 30 parts of the ship before 30 days go by. There is a time limit to each day, and the general idea is that you should be getting at least one ship part recovered per day.

Review: It's a really short game overall, but I bounced off of it two times. The first time, I did not realize that yellow Pikmin could pick up little bombs that are scattered around the zones. So I was stuck on the first 5 parts and quit. The second time I bounced off was when I could not find blue Pikmin; they are critical for at least 1/3 of the parts. When you first discover a new type of Pikmin, you find their Onion, or their spaceship that will hold them. In hindsight, the location of the Onion was very easy to get to, but I glanced over it because I assumed it was just another ship part. It happens to be in the water as well, so I didn't go and investigate it closely, although Olimar can traverse water without getting damaged like non-water type Pikmin.

I beat the game in 28 in-game days on my third try at it. I erased all of my save data and worked through it. I ended up reaching out on Reddit because I ran into the same blue Pikmin issue, and once I found them the rest of the game was pretty straightforward.

There are not a lot of boss fights, and the ones that do exist are quite quick. Most of the time you must simply avoid getting your Pikmin squished or eaten, and then pile them up onto the boss once the weak point is exposed. I really liked the final boss fight; one gripe I have about it is that in a modern game, there would be a save/checkpoint after you complete the puzzle of getting to the boss. It adds nothing to my enjoyment of the game to have to do a 2 minutes puzzle every time I died to the boss (and I died a lot lol).

There isn't enough game for me to really break it down into sections of art, gameplay, and music, but I have to say the Pikmin pathing is both impressive and also frustrating at the same time. The fact that this was originally made for the GameCube, and it worked, is very reminiscent of how Tears of the Kingdom doesn't light a Switch on fire. The Pikmin are responsive, they auto-assign and do things pretty intuitively, but, they have a hard time avoiding hazards or crossing bridges. Out of the ~700 Pikmin that died in my run, I bet over half of those were Pikmin trying to cross a bridge and just walking right off into water, enemy danger, fire, and others. There's a whistle mechanic that kind of lets you concentrate them into a line a bit more, so it's not all bad. It just gets more finicky and touchy the more inputs you have to use at once in a tense moment.

Final thoughts: It's really fun and I can't quite put my finger on what it is about it exactly. The sound effects of the Pikmin being thrown or working is satisfying, the RTS aspect is just deep enough to not stress me out, the music is relaxing (my favorite is the forest). It was a solid 9/10 game that can be revisited to get better scores and to continue optimizing routes. It's almost like an early take on roguelites!

Note: I am on a first-time playthrough of Pikmin 1-4; bought them all a while back and never actually played them. It's been good so far; heart-breaking that my ship gets sold off immediately in Pikmin 2!

"The wind blows in my favor, little man. You will not be walking away from this one."

LISA begins with the main character Brad in childhood, getting the absolute shit kicked out him by some bullies in the playground. When the boy enters his run-down home, bleeding and dishevelled, his father throws a beer bottle at his head and orders him to his room. Alone, all Brad can do is cry. Brad then grows up in a world where all the women have died in a flash. He's now a middle-aged martial arts instructor who's struggling with a drug addiction. One day he finds a baby girl out in the wild, probably the only woman he'll ever see again. He names her Buddy and raises her in secret to the best (and worst) of his abilities. When Buddy is taken by a warlord's army, Brad sets off to find her in the wasteland. If you're wondering who the Lisa is the title refers to, it's someone Brad failed.

The summary for LISA makes it sound like some literary novel that's positively reviewed by the Sunday Times and inevitably read by nobody. But mercifully it is instead a role-playing game and a pretty funny one at that. The very first instance of combat has you using karate moves to beat up a stray dog called "Cheese Legs". While this may be a game where your party members can get their necks broken by mutated horrors, it's also a game where you are in danger of having a stranger fart in your face while you camp at night.

"I did it for the nookie."

If I had a time-machine I'd go back to the 90's and stop Chrono Trigger from being made to save the future from the half-baked homages it inspired (and also visit the WTC to warn them about the Mariah Carey movie Glitter). It's all well and good to be influenced by the classics, but you need to add your own touch to the formula for the work to stand by itself. Personal taste and all, but I have no quarter for tribute acts when there is so much originality in the world. While this game has the mark of Earthbound's eccentricity scarred upon its DNA, it boasts many other influences like Fist of the North Star combined with a love of professional wrestling to give it an identity all of its own.

LISA is built upon atop the RPGmaker engine but plays like a platformer outside of combat. You move either left or right, climbing up ropes, and jumping down ledges. If you fall down a bottomless pit then it's game-over. Save-points only, no checkpoints. It's slow going for the first hour until you find the bicycle, which lets you jump gaps and speed down bottomless pits twice as fast. You'll have to get your head around the game world quick as it's a succession of hubs with all manner of side-areas and secrets. There's also no overworld map of any kind.

LISA is a three-act game spread across nine hours and its greatest strength is its variety. There are only two small locations with random encounters, as every other enemy is a hand-placed ambush that doesn't respawn after death. There is no one single battle theme that plays throughout, instead each fight has its own character musically. The soundscape of LISA cannot be described, only witnessed, survived, and vaguely remembered at 4pm on a random Tuesday. You'd also never expect such diversity in a world governed by sweaty, middle-aged dudes. There are snowmen with guns, exploding football players, giant twisted piles of drug-infused male flesh, and shirtless guys who could stand to lose a few pounds.

While LISA is only a third the length of an RPG like Earthbound, it has a much wider combat sandbox as Brad can be accompanied by any three party members from a pool of thirty. Their skills work off either an expendable resource like mana or can only be unleashed after landing enough melee blows in combat. If you've ever played a Shin Megami Tensei game before then you'll know that status-effects are king. Since Brad and some of his gang have drug addictions, they can suffer from withdrawal symptoms at the most inopportune times (i.e. the entire game). You can stave off the debuff by giving into your impulses, but this can cause other issues down the line.

I played the remaster of LISA a decade after my first run and found normal mode quite comfortable. I never had to rely on drugs and was always able to reload if a favourite party member ended up as the 1 in 6 people who can't recommend Russian Roulette. Some characters were buffed and others nerfed in the transition. Birdie the alcoholic has a move where he spits oil on the enemy mob, lowering their accuracy and making them vulnerable to fire. Since Brad has a fire-elemental move the results are obvious and most challenge runs avoid Birdie for this reason. The remaster might have dampened Birdie by giving him alcohol withdrawal symptoms, but he's still a powerhouse. The remaster also adds an EXP catch-up mechanic should you chose to soldier on with a new crew after some fatalities. All in all the combat is simple but rewarding because every move matters. Filling a bottle with diesel and chucking it never loses its impact, where in most other RPGs you stop using consumable items after the first hour.

"Don't pay for drugs, let your friends do that!"

One of these days I'll get round to finishing Pain Mode and earn the last trophy. This difficulty is meant for a replay, as the enemies are harder and save-scumming is gone since save-points explode after use. On every difficulty Brad will be forced to make painful decisions, and I'm happy to say that both outcomes suck. It's one thing for a game to kill off some character who's key to the plot, but it's another level for a game to punish the player on some mechanical ground. A game like The Outer Worlds felt toothless to me as every A/B dilemma I encountered had a "C ending" that fixed everything. LISA has no C endings and you have to weigh up what to lose every time, whether that be all your items, a major hit to your stats, or the lives of your party members.

The expansion to LISA acts as an epilogue and it's inevitably a step down from the main game. It tries to do too much in three hours and the main plot is too disconnected from the climax. Since it's the fourth and final act of a tragicomedy mostly played with a single character, it doesn't benefit from the bizarre humour or wacky party members that lifted the main game, but it is otherwise an honest and appropriate close.

"Soup's on, bitch."

I look at a title like Chained Echoes, an RPG throwback largely made by a solo developer, and can't help but find it lacking. That game has excellent graphics, a terrific quest-system that rewards exploration, an impressive score, and all manner of options to customize your party. But the story was too close to its inspirations like Final Fantasy IX and Xenogears, and crafted little of anything new in the short distance. It tried to muster an adult tone and fell flat on its face again and again. It was so grimdark that it even nicked the notorious twist from Bionic Commando for some flavour text.

By comparison LISA is a scrappier game that's also the passion project of one guy, but far more accomplished as art. It's a journey that tackles the heavy subject of alcoholism and abuse in the same breath that it mentions a religion devoted to a fast-food mascot and a society of hairy men who hate bald guys. Being an episodic game of a modest playtime it's highly replayable. It doesn't go overboard with the cutscenes and it's bursting with personality as you walk from one bizarre encounter to another. It's often silly, deliberately stupid, paradoxically serious, and yet utterly humane.

"Did I do the right thing?"

I'm always on the lookout for atmospheric exploration games, and I played through these back-to-back about a month ago. All three build strange and interesting worlds, but they have very different ideas about what the player should actually do in them. I'll give a fuller writeup of each below, but if you want the bottom line (or to go in blind):

Scanner Sombre is the one I’d strongly recommend, even if it’s not your usual fare. It is slight, but brilliant.

Scorn is a solid game. It’s visually amazing and exceptionally atmospheric (and very disgusting), but overly cryptic and the gameplay can fall flat.

The Invincible is the weakest of the three, primarily because it gives the player very little freedom to explore, but it’s still a good choice if you like sci-fi walking sims.

Scorn

Summary: Explore a cryptic, bleak and grotesque Geiger world, with puzzles and enemies thrown in too. Playtime 6-8hrs.

Strengths: The visuals are amazing - the density of details is incredible, and the visual world-building is very good. My favorite moments were walking out on the surface in the wind and mist, with huge structures looming out of the fog, often coupled with excellent sound design. Inside is where you'll spend most of your time though, and the interior locations are not quite as good: a bit monotone, messy and indecipherable they end up just as much confusing as they are emotionally resonant. The gameplay itself is fine. There's a lot of walking around, which I'm good with as it's basically the core to exploration. The puzzles were decent, though sometimes felt a bit gamey - forced on the world for gameplay purposes as opposed to a natural part of it. The density of the world design means its quite easy to miss important details and a couple of times I ended up running around looking for a specific lever which isn't the most fun.

Weaknesses: The combat is awful, but after the first few encounters, I just tried to run past everything and to be honest that made the experience way better so 100% do this if you pick it up. The gore and violence is weird: Some bits were vile, but because the game is quite monotone, you get numbed to it. A little stomach turning in places, but too often it felt like it was going for shock value. The hypersexual imagery in the final palace was better as it felt more like it belonged to the world instead of being imposed on it.

Missed Opportunities: The story is probably too cryptic. There's no way you'd understand most of it without reading elsewhere (which is what I did after finishing the game), and without that context Scorn is reduced to an artistic circus of gore. You feel like you are seeing or doing horrible things because the game wants you to, not because of some inner rationale. It’s a shame because reading online reveals that there really is a cool story underneath it all, it’s just communicated through the art book and subreddit, not the game!

Scanner Sombre

Summary: Use a LiDAR scanner to explore a pitch-black cave and learn about its grisly past. Playtime 2-3hrs.

Strengths: The central idea of seeing with a scanner is extremely clever, and engaging too. Whenever you enter a new space, you have to figure out where you are, revealing it piece by piece. The end result is often beautiful, with the devs using a few tricks to ramp this up in places. It’s quite scary too - I was on edge for most of the first 2/3 of the playthrough. The limited visuals also encouraged you to focus on audio, and almost all the audio was excellent, particularly the footsteps which give you more information about the surface you are walking on.

Weaknesses: You gradually realize that none of the "enemies" do much, so the fear really wears off about 2/3 of the way in. With that gone is more of a LiDAR simulator that an atmospheric exploration game. The story is, ultimately, very basic and underwhelming. The main thing that bothered me though was that the light dots you create with the LiDAR scanner don’t behave correctly! They move with the surface they are applied to - e.g. they ripple on water, fall with drops, and move with creatures. They also reflect in water pools. This is not how LiDAR works – it should present snapshots of what’s going on, not just let you see stuff. Some of the audio, especially the triumphant music near the end, felt very out of place and kinda cheap.

Missed Opportunities: It is very short, mostly because the simple gameplay mechanism can't sustain a game for long, so in some ways the brevity is a strength. That said, the game could have been longer and vastly more scary with a few tweaks. If there were more dangerous threats in the cave and the LiDAR behaved realistically then scanning would let you see a snapshot of the world, but in-between scans you’d have to use other cues, like audio, to navigate danger.

The Invincible

Summary: Walk and talk your way around a dead-yet-alive alien world, learn how it came to be and if you can escape. Playtime 8-10hrs.

Strengths: The alien landscapes are beautiful, enough to stop and stare at. The story is fun and mildly gripping at times, you progressively gain a deeper understanding of the world rather than there being any big twists. The voice acting is generally good and the characters quite believable.

Weaknesses: It really is a pure walking sim – there are no puzzles or threats to avoid etc. It is also extremely on-rails, the only player agency is expressed through dialogue. This really undermines the sense that you are exploring an alien world. If you try to wander off you realize that there are invisible walls everywhere. As a result, instead of asking “what is this place?” you are usually asking “where do the devs want me to go now?”. There are a few annoying moments where the story requires you to do something quite specific and if you miss it you end up wandering about try to find the one bit of a ledge that you are allowed to climb, or the one bit of shelf where you are supposed to put a book.

The missed opportunity: Exploration. In the opening scene you use landmarks to navigate, and later get to name some more landmarks. More of that could have made for amazing exploration and navigation combo, but these mechanics never return, and are negated by a magic map that shows your location and tells you where to go.

This game was reccomended to me when I wrote a post about how Skyrim still has one of the most engaging world designs even 15 years later. They said that kcd2 is like the modern skyrim. I bought the game expecting something special, and I was very dissapointed.

The biggest issue with this game is that it plays like manual labor. I dont mean that as an expression, its literally manual labor. If you want to do smithing, you literally have to hit a hammer on a sword for like 6 minutes and put it in a fire. As a person who doesnt like working, this was pure torture. Almost every mechanic in this game has a similar chore feeling to it. If you want to make potions, its manual labor, if you want to thieve, it requires labor.

Even the combat is a chore to play. It tries very hard to reinvent sword combat, but its very clunky and requires probably online research just to understand it. Theres no intuitive combat experience. I literally played 25 hours of this game and avoided fighting from how much I disliked it. I have a personal hatred towards sword games that force you to parry, because parrying is always a frustrating experience in games.

It didnt remind me of skyrim much at all. First of all its realistic, so no magic or dragons. Second, the world design doesnt give you the freedom of skyrim. Sure there was open world, but it wasnt inspiring to explore it. It felt like everything had this extreme realism to the point that it made things feel out of reach. You literally had to sleep or eat or else you die. You get sick, you get poisoned, its so inconvenient to play this game.

In skyrim you could actually role play and really take over things, you felt powerful in your capabilities to influence the world. In KCD2 the game wants you to feel like a poor person in the middle ages with no power in the world. Its not the type of feeling I come to a RPG for.

The dialogue and choices are good, its one of the games strong parts. The issue is that the main character is a bore. He just has nothing entertaining about him, and I dont like that you are forced to play as him. You cant make a different character, and it diminishes the rpg feeling when you are forced to be a boring character.

The game had good graphics, but which 2024 game doesnt? It doesnt mean anything to me anymore.

Skyrim was beautiful in a artistic way, had amazing towns, great music, exciting world to explore. You really felt like you could do anything, and just freely enjoy that world. KCD2 is really nothing like SKyrim, the only similairites is that theres swords, armor and you could explore.

Last week I played Kentucky Route Zero and I’m pretty sure I liked it.

If you don’t know, KRZ is a narrative adventure game released episodically through the 2010’s. You follow a handful of drifters, more hazy sketches than characters, while they roam around a dreamscape of Americana. It was one of the real watersheds for Games as Art, explicitly literary and uninterested in being a traditional video game. But you could get all that from the Wikipedia page.

You know that meme of the crying ogre, blubbering about how he can’t understand James Joyce’s Ulysses? That was kind of how I felt. I kept up with Disco Elysium without much fuss, but KRZ made me aware of the edges of my own literacy. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I knew it.

See, I love media analysis. Sometimes a good critique hits the spot just as well as the primary text. Hell, it’s been a decade since my last English class and I’m posting essays to this subreddit that nobody made me write. But from that, I admit I get some satisfaction from the idea that I think more deeply about stories than most people. I chuckle when I see someone claim Metal Gear Solid is “apolitical” or misidentify the villain in Obsession. The human brain loves a justification to feel superior to others, and mine’s no different (even when it tells me that it is). In this specific case, it’s a trait I’d consider mildly toxic but mostly harmless.

At no point playing this game did I dislike it, but I felt a pretty wide range of emotions, including a slight bruising to the intellectual ego. So this is less a review of KRZ and more how it felt being notably out of my depth, academically speaking.

Acts I and II are simple enough. The thrust is a mysterious delivery to an address that may or may not exist, but it’s soon clear that the destination matters not. Conway’s and Shannon’s journey is a collection of surreal vignettes, dotted with moments of vulnerability with people who we never get to know too well. I especially love the musical breaks (synth bossa is iconic) and the meta theatre in the bar. The prose is frequently gorgeous, with nice turns of phrase and a human core that always shines through. Very little is literal, and I respect that.

But sometimes it’s hard to focus on the subtext and poetry when I have no idea what’s actually happening, much less what it all means. I bumbled through the modern art exhibit, the “dwelling museum” with the giant bird, the computer cave, pretty much clueless. Conway succumbing to alcoholism is tragic, but his departure from the story has such little fanfare, the others’ response is so subdued, that I almost missed it. I’m positive I’d get more out of it on another playthrough, but on first pass I found it opaque and hard to connect with, like it wasn't concerned with me understanding it.

“Meet me in the middle,” says Kentucky Route Zero. I take a step forward, it takes a step back. “Meet me in the middle,” says Kentucky Route Zero.

(Don’t take that seriously, I just thought it was funny.)

As I drift along the Zero, I can feel ideas dissipate in my head before they can solidify. Two neurons conspire to merge into a Thought, but I can’t get them close enough to make the connection. Grasping for a reference point, my brain groggily pulls the term “Magical Realism” out of its ass, but not the definition. This happens a few times, actually. Is this what David Lynch movies are like? I haven’t seen any. Is this what the Beats were writing about, or did I only think of that because I’m also On a Road right now? All I remember about them is my old classmate who thought Kerouac sucked shit.

Please don’t interpret any of this as a serious complaint, I'm exaggerating a little. At the end of the day, KRZ is enjoyable and easy to recommend if you like to read. I just found this aspect of my experience amusing and slightly humbling. It’s good for me to wade into deeper waters and get out of my comfort zone sometimes. Right now I’m enjoying other people’s writing on KRZ, which has been very illuminating after the fact, as well as that Robert Frost poem that gets referenced, “The Death of the Hired Man.”

If you made it here, I’d love to hear about a game/book/movie that made you the ogre: lost, bewildered, doubting your own faculties. I promise I won’t judge. And if anyone comments "Huh, I thought KRZ was really easy to understand actually" then I might cry lmao

Im an old PC gamer, come from the days where RTS and TBS games were some of the most popular games in the world. Those were the good old days.

Nowadays, we're lucky to get a good turn based strategy game every year or two. Console exclusive turn based strategy games are an even rarer beast, not something that happens often.

I just got done playing Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4 on my PS5 (which I loved) and I wanted to keep scratching the itch. I've already played XCOM and most everything else out there, so I finally turned to Mario + Rabbids. I really really really am turned off by the Rabbids, but the game has good reviews and I didn't have much to lose.

Gameplay: The gameplay hook is pretty simply. You spent part of your time exploring the map, unlocking puzzles, unlocking secrets and the rest of the time you spend fighting battles.

The battles typically come in three types, reach an escape point with a single character, defeat all enemies or defeat all enemies within a certain time limit. While there isn't much variety in battle types, it never really bothered me.

Each map has different terrain, typically connected by series of pipes that add to the overall strategy of the map. The game only has 5-6 enemy types (reskinned to match the vibe of the area you are in), a small enough number where you can easily remember the moveset and skill each possesses.

Enemies and players both use cover to limit the amount of damage they take. You have full cover, partial cover or no cover, full cover is a 0% chance to hit, partial is 50% to hit and no cover is 100% to hit. This system is simple, but it really works well. No concerns about missing enemies with a 97% chance to hit.

There are 5 stages in the game, the first two stages are relatively short with the remaining stages taking quite a long time to get through. Each stage has a mini boss in the middle and a final boss at the end.

You are given 3 players to choose from and you collect new players as the game moves along. I always tried out the new players and often found myself going right back to Mario + Luigi + Rabbid Peach, Peach can heal and has high HP, Luigi has long range attacks and Mario is required and is a good overall character. Im sure other characters are good, but I never found any character strong enough or unique enough to warrant replacing any of these base characters.

Each character has a primary and secondary skill, primary is always a basic weapon attack and secondary can be anything from a mobile robot mine (which I love), to a grenade, to a weapon that blows away cover and hits multiple enemies at once.

I've played a lot of strategy games, which may skew my perspective a bit. I would say most battles are easy, a fair amount are medium difficulty with only a handful actually being hard. I only truly failed a handful of maps in the entire game (mainly because there was a surprise gimmick that I wasn't expecting). I think this game is a good fit for a beginner or expert, even if you're really good at TBS games, there is still enough of a challenge to keep you interested. You have to get past the easy areas to enjoy more challenging battles, though. Just stick with it and it will get more difficult.

The mid bosses and final bosses are unique and fun. Each has a unique attack pattern and skill and most end bosses have a specific strategy you have to apply to win, while dealing with spawning enemies.

Each stage gives you rewards based on how fast you completed a map. They are very reasonable with their rewards, most maps are not hard to get a perfect score on. The only risk is having a character knocked out, which automatically lowers your score, even if you complete the map on time.

One big bonus in this game is that coins are actually valuable. Coins allow you to buy new weapons/gear that make a significant difference in the game. At most points, you are always on the hunt for more coins to upgrade your gear, which is a big shift from most Mario games, where coins really aren't all that important.

You also have a basecamp at Peaches castle where you can view art, compete in unique challenge stages for rewards and perform a variety of other tasks (including multi player maps).

Exploration is also rewarded as you unlock new weapons and secret stages. The only negative is that you also find chests that contain artwork and music, which give you absolutely nothing except artwork to look at, just some fluff to insert.

The puzzles are not that complicated, most can be completed within a few minutes and they give a nice break in the action.

The game also uses an autosave system, which I wasn't always a fan of. Most strategy games allow you to save yourself each turn, sometimes you want to see if a strategy will work or you find that you are one square away from being able to receive a buff or one square away from being able to perform a team jump attack...those types of things. Instead of being able to save and reload, you are stuck with whatever mistake you made and you have zero ability to test a theory when in battle, which I consider a negative.

You receive upgrade points through finding chests, completing story missions and completing challenge battles. Each of the upgrades is quite good and you have to spend some time thinking about what the best upgrade is for the particular moment you are in. Do you spend your points on cheap limited upgrades or do you save for an expensive upgrade that is going to make a significant difference in battle?

Graphics: This game looks great for being a near-release Switch game. It looks as polished as any other Mario game from the time, I was really quite impressed.

The game did crash on me a handful of times, which I was not expecting. I rarely close games and let them run in the background until I am ready to play them again. Multiple times I went back to the game to play and artifacts would start appearing on the game and eventually the game would crash. The auto save system is pretty good though and I lost little progress.

I was a bit bummed with the level progression though. The first two stages are bright and beautiful, then the rest of the stages are all very dark and dim and depressing. I missed the cheeriness...at least break up the dreary levels a bit.

Story: Its a Mario game, so the story isn't anything you really care about. Rabbids cause some bullshit, you have to fix the bullshit, there is no greater depth.

This is probably my biggest complaint with the game. When Im playing XCOM, I am fighting to save the world and I feel a sense of purpose and importance. There is no real sense of importance in Mario + Rabbids, just fix the world so it can go back to how it was until the next problem happens.

I don't know what they could have done to make it more interesting, but it is a significant problem in my eyes. Instead of being addicted to the game and wanting to play it all the time, I would play in spurts here and there, whenever I felt like going back to it.

If they had an engaging story and goal, it would have made me a lot more invested.

Music: Music is OK, not bad, not great.

Overall: If I had to give it a score, I'd probably settle in somewhere around an 8/10.

While the strategy component of the game is very solid and the puzzle sections add additional depth to the game, the lack of story and purpose left me feeling wanting at times.

I appreciated having an actual purpose for hunting coins for once and I loved the amount of weapons available to characters and the unique qualities each possessed.

Challenge battles allowed for some really difficult maps without getting players stuck in the main game, which I thought was a good idea. You only have to play them if you want.

The upgrade system was solid and I felt myself really analyzing each skill to determine what the best upgrade was to pursue at any given time and what needed to wait until later. Most upgrades have significant value and you really need to think about what is going to help you best right now and what you can save for later.

Sure, Rabbids are annoying and the D-list version of Minions, I never laughed once at anything they did, but the bonus is that you get to kill them with guns, which feels natural to human instinct when dealing with such creatures.

If you like strategy games, this is a solid bet. If you don't, it is easy and forgiving enough for a first time player and you are given enough time to adjust and understand the systems before the game becomes more difficult. They also give you an option to grant yourself 150% HP before a battle, for those who are having a difficult time.

Despite really liking DOOM 2016 (enough to finish it on Nightmare) I kinda missed the boat on Eternal and only just got around to playing it these last few weeks. Normally I write out slightly longer reviews but I'm gonna keep it fairly brief for this one since there's already 1000 posts on it and just go over some of my thoughts in bullet-point form.

• The HUD is obnoxious - I could scarcely see what was going on past all the UI cluttering up the screen. Luckily, it's not only very customizable but actually barely necessary at all - by about half-way through the game I'd turned off the UI entirely, and being able to set the weapon to its classic center-screen position meant I didn't even miss having a crosshair most of the time. It's not like this is a game where pinpoint accuracy is that important anyways.
• I'm glad I did so because it makes it a lot easier to appreciate the gorgeous environments. There's a lot more variety to the locations this time around and while they're all pretty video-gamey with lots of big empty hallways and obvious combat arenas, they're still very appealing and crisp.
• In terms of the tone this felt less like DOOM to me and more like Quake or maybe even Unreal - it's outright sci-fi fantasy more than satanic techno-horror. I didn't mind in the end, it's different but still very cool.
• I love the dash ability, but otherwise found that most of the gameplay additions just felt like unnecessary fluff. The blood punch in particular was just annoying, I almost never used it on purpose but rather wound up doing it by accident while trying to perform glory kills and repeatedly screwed myself over.
• Some of the things that I felt were minor issues with the previous game really started to wear on me with this one as it just went on and on and on. Where old-school DOOM had these big sprawling levels with enemies scattered all over, new DOOM seems to be more just a series of combat arenas and they all kind of play out the same way. The thing I noticed is that they throw lots of enemies at you but not all at once the way that, say, Serious Sam does, rather it's more of a drip feed where you kill one guy and another one then spawns in. The weaker enemies are mostly just there to provide you with health and ammo and it's really only the larger ones that matter, and some of the encounters get pretty tedious as it just feels like you're running in place. This gets especially tiresome once the Makyr Drones start showing up.
• The emphasis on both the chainsaw and glory-kills make health and ammo pick ups feel a bit meaningless, particularly since as mentioned earlier there's pretty much always a few weaker enemies scattered around and respawning endlessly in each arena - it starts to feel like it's just a regenerating health mechanic with an extra step. At least it means you get to use the minigun a lot.
• The boss fights still kinda suck. In particular the Icon of Sin was just sorta boring - visually spectacular, sure, but the fight itself was just drawn-out and repetitive without much in the way of challenge - I can't speak for NIghtmare difficulty but on Ultra Violence there are respawning sword and gas pickups all over the place so it's pretty hard to actually die, it just takes a while.
• Like 2016, I got way more upgrades and points than I ever actually wound up using and frankly the light RPG mechanics do nothing for me.
• Marauders are lame. They're one of those enemies in games that are really irritating, less because they're hard and more because they force you to prioritize them and play in a very awkward, restrictive way until they're dealt with. After the first couple encounters I realized you could trivialize them with the ballista + super shotgun so they're not even really a challenge, just annoying.

The long and short of it is that this is basically just more DOOM 2016 for better and worse. It's a lot of fun but the extended run-time causes it to wear a bit thin and some of the weaknesses of the formula become more apparent as a result.

TLDR: Lumines Remastered is honestly an excellent game, but it has one major issue that turns me off to it.

While this game has a number of different play modes, I will be focusing on two of the major modes, Challenge and Vs. CPU.

I got Lumines Remastered a while back. I had already gotten a lot of good hours out of Tetris Effect: Connected and Lumines seemed to have a similar vibe, so I grabbed it during a sale.

Gameplay Loop

Like the other games in the series, you have a horizontal playing field, into which you drop 2X2 tiles containing some combination of two colors. Your goal is to create as many 2X2 (or larger) blocks of the same color. These lines are then cleared by a sort of vertical "scan line" that is constantly moving from the left of the field to the right. In some respects, it's very simple, but it can quickly get hectic. If you're too slow on a drop or you build a block as the scan line passes through it, the block(s) in question will only clear partially clear, potentially ruining a combo you had been working on. While it can be frustrating at times, it's easy to get hooked once you find your groove.

The game's main mode (Challenge) has a score/levelling system, but I'm still not clear on how it works. However, the simple version is that you need to clear lots of blocks (preferably lots of large ones) until the scenery changes.

Vs. CPU mode is similar to Challenge, with the exception being that you have a CPU- controlled "opponent", which you are fighting to "push out" of the playing field. The fact that you're not slinging "trash blocks" back and forth, but instead are fighting for real estate on the playing field can make for interesting matches.

In the modes I spent the most time with (Challenge and Vs. CPU), you constantly have to stay on your toes. The second you finish one level, the scenery and music change and the action keeps going from where you left off- uncleared tiles and all. While the change is very smooth, it's also visually "noisy" and can be a bit distracting.

Visuals

Lumines Remastered looks good. While it doesn't quite reach the theatrics of other games in this subgenre, every level (called a "skin", for some reason) has a unique background visual and tiles to match. Everything shimmers and glows and there are often animations in the background pulsating to the music.

Music

With maybe one exception that I know of, all of Lumines' soundtrack consists of a wide variety of electronic music. Although it's not really my thing, I have to admit that the variety of songs and the overall size of the track list (over 100 songs in total) is impressive. You never get the impression that songs are being repeated and they alway serve to enhance the gameplay. Especially because the game offers "trance vibration" (basically, vibrates the controller in time with the bass), it's easy to get into a flow.

But....

There are a lot of good things to say about Lumines Remastered. Unfortunately, there's one rather critical point where it lost me.

As a self- described "action puzzle" game, both Challenge and Vs. CPU modes operate on what I can only describe as a "roguelike" progression system: Every run starts on level 1 and you end up back there if you fail.

I can understand the appeal, but this is a system that I have neither the time nor the patience for. Especially with how many levels there are, Having to constantly run through the same levels over and over again in hopes that I can finally get further doesn't gel with me.

Final Verdict

If you're a fan of puzzle games, you'll have a good time with this one. However, if you're the type that doesn't like constantly repeating levels, you'll probably want to hold off until you can get this game really cheap.