I would like to formally apologize for misrepresenting this game. If I have ever referred to this as a "gaslight gatekeep girlboss" experience, know that in fact Princess Elise has gates locked from her until she completes her quests, and is also gaslit on the veracity of her adventure. Such a statement in fact is only roughly 33% true. I promise to do better.

Oh, I guess there's also the part where I really didn't like this game, coming to the conclusion that it was a tedious chore after... 30 minutes of playing? It's weird, but despite overall liking the game more this time around, I honestly don't disagree with anything I said. Most of this game revolves around really tedious fetchquests. I guess over time it sorta turned into that typical comfortable JRPG vibe, but there were definitely points where it devolved into repeating stuff over and over just to get that one last thing.

Although one upside to having barely played the game before is that there was a couple more interesting mechanics than I expected. In fact, the only reason I picked this game up again was because I saw it in a video, and it has dungeon crawling I was not aware of. The sort of typical grindy JRPG combat makes more sense when you've got to manage your resources through a whole dungeon, especially as you often need to leverage your pouting abilities to lower the difficulty enough to get through the whole thing.

Of course, I guess that's what leads into what's really important, which is how simply epic Princess Elise is. Imagine playing a game where your main character isn't so spoiled as to be able to terraform the very Earth. Every time she speaks will become the rawest line of all time.

Although beyond the comedy factor, I thought her journey to become an adventurer was a little more interesting than I went in expecting. At first it's mostly farcical, with the ever dreaded "gamer humor" I noticed way back when. But over time, as there's more of a need for an actual hero, her uh... unique skill set lets her fill that role really well. Which kinda fits with how you gradually get better at leveraging her spoiled princess skills to get through dungeons with more resources to fight the boss (particularly the relatively expensive one to weaken all the enemies). Having to drop the boss's level by 10 and then stunlock them a bunch is a very fitting way to be an epic video game hero in the most Princess Elise way possible.

Overall, though, it's just kind of an alright RPG. I don't know if it's really worth it just to experience the very funny protagonist and her neat story. I guess why I was so mad about this the first time around was because "kind of alright RPG" pretty quickly turns into a slog if you're not really in the mood for it. I'm at least glad I got more out of this game the second time around.

Don't really feel like editing all my random lists that put this game so low, so I guess they'll just stay as is. What, you think someone can just spend 100 Pout Points to edit all of them?

why do i hear mid jrpg battle music

switch owners be like "it's portable though"

Nah for real this game's still pretty rad. I can't even pretend to represent an era in gaming where 3D graphics were impressive, but this game definitely nails the flying through space vibe. The illusion of a physical 3D space worked way better for me than I thought it would. And then besides the graphics it's a fun arcadey shooter. There's almost certainly better but my interaction with 99% of video game genres is filtered by Nintendo stuff, please understand.

i dont have a better transition so uh the music is cool, like the Corneria and Meteor themes. Really makes you think oh shit it's star fox let's go!! On the subject of smaller details, I appreciate the feeling of adventuring with your crew. I guess it makes sense the early gamer Internet would insult their poor dogfighting skills or whatever but nothing feels better than reassuring the homies that badabada ba daba at the end of every level. Especially because I heard they die in this one if their shield reaches 0??

Overall though, Star Fox is certifiably pretty cool. There's definitely parts where the bosses become a Powerpoint presentation and every input is more of a prayer you get out of the way, or a triagonal prism sucker punches you from off the camera, but it wasn't consistent enough to detract from the game too much for me. I dunno I don't feel like going "oh the 1993 3D tech demo has aged considerably and must be understood as a product of its time 🤓🤓🤓" because I really did have fun with it. Normalizing just liking an old video game cuz you're simply too epic for the haters to stop you 😎

I think this is where any normal person would just play the N64 one instead, but I don't really have a way to do that right now. Nuts.

Finally playing a Touhou game feels like I've crossed some kind of cursed boundary I can't recover from. I guess time will tell if I've ended up in some deep dark abyss of my own making.

What time doesn't need to tell you is that I think this game is really good! Short but sweet metroidvania, cool time stuff, baller bosses, it's one of those games that's so focused on the gameplay that I kinda end up just listing the features in it because they're all rad. Well worth whatever nonsense I was spouting above.

This game's interface is kinda static so it burnt out my screen a little. Nothing major and it wore off dw. Also it's a good thing you can disable that screen flashing I saw in one of those longplays because that looked like it'd get annoying real quick.

I guess I'm just focusing on the small stuff because I have surprisingly little to say about the game itself. It is undeniably a cartoonish prompt fleshed out into a video game. Said video game contains a methodical gameplay pace with decisions in it, and every time playing the video game is slightly different due to "roguelike" elements. I would say this is solidly a Good Videogame™, so I think fans of video games (especially the aforementioned roguelikes) will like this one.

"one royal fucker with a shotgun" is a good line, admittedly

I keep thinking this game's name is Ligament.

Probably just not for me because I'm a dumbass when it comes to puzzle games. That process of my brain turning into mush before I look up the answer and find it was something exceedingly dumb is why Baba is You is gonna be stranded in my backlog for quite a while.

I checked this one out because it was free on Epic Games, and also it seemed to have a unique premise with its whole rope mechanic. You're trying to tie your little string around all the generator block thingies in order to unlock the door, but you can't walk over your string, so you've got a lot to plan out. Making sure your string is tight enough or tied to maintain contact with the blocks, planning the optimal route to not cut yourself off from the exit, it's all rather intuitive even if some of the puzzles make me feel like I need to absorb graph theory to figure out what to do.

There's some extra exploration stuff wrapped around the puzzles, too. I don't know if "isolated puzzles broken up by exploring a static space for worldbuilding" is one of those overdone subgenres that some guy with the blandest taste in games thinks is ruining the indie scene, but it seems serviceable enough. You walk around a nice looking spaceship, and there's some junk scattered about like old magazines and computer terminals hinting at what's going on. Although it's not abandoned because there's some sort of tryhard quirky character stuck on the ship that you're going to end up helping. They seem pretty generic but maybe if I actually played the game for more than like an hour more of the story would get revealled and they'd be interesting.

This is probably a weird thing to say, but I hate the one song they have in this game. Feels like it should be in a commercial about how an oil company definitely cares about your feelings, I don't want to puzzle solve to this.

Overall, seems like a good puzzle game, but definitely not the kind of game I specifically want to play. People more inclined towards this genre would probably have a great time, honestly. And plus, I got it for free, and unlike Rising Hell I actually reviewed it while it still is free, so it's pretty worth it to check out.

Speaking of free games, Shadow Tactics spent so long in the dark corners of my Steam library that I didn't touch it before it's gonna be free on Epic Games. Damn, that's like 5 dollars I could have spent on... Sonic Adventure, or something.

thank you tim sweeney i love the taste of mid free roguelike in the morning

I think the game taps into the funny side of edgy well enough, with the dumb guitar songs (affectionate) and the overblown announcer in the main menu. Gameplay is definitely there, the core action is simple enough to be fun to bulldoze through. I don't get why the second boss has a full on bullet hell attack though, it doesn't really fit with the stiff movement which was otherwise tolerable.

It's kinda fun, but not all that gripping. There's definitely worse ways to spend zero dollars on the Epic Games Store, though. Like when Fallout 3 is available next week probably.

(This game isn't even free anymore by the way)