Harold Halibut is a very technically impressive (when its not bugging out or dropping frames) feat, which unfortunately puts its gorgeous claymation style and cinematography in service of an overwritten, overindulgent miserable slog which might have been refreshing were it a fifth of its length instead of the overbearing wank we got instead.

Wank is the operative word here, the game is spiritually similar to jerking off. It takes inspiration from various sources, wes anderson films chief among them, but from what few films I have seen of those, they were much more entertaining and well written. The sheer nothingness of the gameplay even for narrative focused adventure games and amount of dialogue that was 3 lines too long for what it needed to be really fits together when you learn about the game's 10 year development time. This is someone's baby, presumably a labour of love, but thats the thing, sometimes you need to detach yourself emotionally from your work and cut things when they don't actually add anything. The most damning thing of all, after all that, 8 goddamned hours (it felt twice that) I feel nothing. The game is nothing. I am nothing. We're all nothing. And I have 8 fewer hours now before I return to the nothingness of oblivion with little to show for it.

The cutscene that plays when using the dynamite on a battle is the single best thing ever implemented in any videogame in all of human history and I’m only mildly exaggerating.

A macabre festival where the dance never ends, a fever dream made out of bones and clay; Hylics manages to perfectly capture the feeling of a nightmare that seems to be completely absurd, yet it manages to craft meaning within the spiral of chaos. Places with random names located in islands that make no sense; mazes and entire worlds inside machines down ladders that somehow connect, and half of the odd weirdos you come across seem to speak in riddles and the other half take the insanity of this realm as another Tuesday, but all share the incredibly exaggerated animations, that range from the smoothest hand and clay movement you could think of in battles to just three frames for each walk cycle, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If Hylics delivers something in spades, it’s definitively a sense of style, of harsh clay figurines and contrasting colors, of poems and jokes, with mountaintops populated by cone-shaped cultists and an afterlife full of fishes and a couch. I could list every single area and enemy in this game and say, ‘’WoAH! That was pretty weird and cool!’’, but I think the fact the game is just that, an avalanche of nonsense and weird shapes—and somehow finds a way to make an actually pretty simple tale and a world that has some sort of meaning and makes sense—is far more impressive than the weird moments themselves.

The harsh and quiet melodies, the special moves you get by watching the TVs, the pals you meet along the way; it’s really hard to talk about individual aspects of Hylics because everything seems intrinsically connected with each other and totally unique at the same time, which ironically makes it so some of the moments that stand out like a sore thumb are those in which it feels like the game doesn’t go nuts enough with its ideas.

The combat system, as crazy as some of the attacks get, is still pretty light; there are some cool things about it, like how it connects to the afterlife, some item interactions, and how the game’s own openness makes meeting allies and gaining abilities completely up to you. But I think that’s where the interest peaks, in how the combat is pretty determined by what you do outside of it, and when it comes to battles themselves, while there are some interesting bosses, it soon became pretty clear others are just damage sponges and that you can become pretty powerful very easily, and that plus how the areas are designed often makes combat seem more like a chore you sometimes do to get past a certain point or gain meat and money, and that otherwise evading conflict is often the faster, less annoying option.

And again, it’s in these battles where some of the more abstract and impressive animations can be found, and if anything, the final area and boss fight will ask of you to have gotten many special secret moves and quite the amount of bucks, so it isn’t completely valueless to engage in combat, but in a game with such a crazy atmosphere and universe, I was hoping for something far more engaging.

I was hoping to see more of the party members, who seem to lose their mouths the moment they join you. I was hoping for some of the puzzles to be more out there. I was hoping for more of its insane style to slip into other areas, like the menus or the secrets… Hylics presents an impossibly creative world, and even if it doesn’t last longer than it needs to and it's full of amazing stuff, it feels as if its full potential has yet to be achieved.

But what was accomplished is unforgettable; despite wishing I got to see more of their personalities, the yellow devil and his three friends singing and playing in a bar in the middle of nowhere and plowing through the forces of the moon before facing the final fiend are some amazing moments that made me laugh despite no words being said. Wade is a menace, but not one that has to be locked up; in fact, it should be let out even more wild. Godspeed, you crazy bastard…

Also, big fan of Somsnosa, it’s always nice to see another hat with horns appreciator…

Sega had a rough transition to 3D.

It all started with the 32X. This is unlike most stories, which usually start at the beginning. The 32X was, to put it politely, a fucking disgrace. A lot of historical accounts regarding what a nightmare it was to work for Sega start around this time — Scott Bayless claims that former CEO Hayao Nakayama sent the order down from on-high for a project that was ill-defined and mismanaged from the start, comparing the company to the Hindenburg; Tom Kalinske says that he desperately tried to get Sega to kill the console, to use a Silicon Graphics chip that would later be poached by Nintendo, to partner up with Sony to make the PlayStation long before Sony did it by themselves and made a boatload of money — and was rebuked at every turn. A bit later, Peter Moore told Yuji Naka to fuck off and left for Microsoft after the latter accused the former of faking a video of a focus group who said that Sega was old and boring. Of course, these accounts are all clouded by a combination of bias, the Pacific Ocean, and a language barrier; I admit that I find it a bit difficult to believe Kalinske was such a good businessman that Nakayama was “literally slapping subordinates” (in his words) because of how bad Sega of Japan looked compared to the American branch. Still, though, it paints a picture. Sega is broadly described as being a nightmare company to work for starting right around the time the 32X started being developed, and its reputation never once improves in anyone’s retrospective accounts. The games on the 32X could run in primitive 3D, which was neat, but that was about it. The 32X launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within three years.

The Sega Saturn surprise-launched in the west, to the complete and utter dismay of retailers. So incensed were they by what they perceived to be a fuck-you on two fronts — the miserable launch of the 32X leading into the Saturn just six months later combined with the fact that only some of them were selected to stock it — that many of these retailers outright cut ties with Sega. Hell, the Sega CD wasn’t exactly moving units at the time either, so Sega was cannibalizing itself on three different fronts. As much love as I have for the Sega Saturn and its utterly strange architecture, the console really wasn’t setting the west on fire. Japan liked it, largely because it ran arcade games pretty well. But there was one major, horrifying problem.

The Sega Saturn didn’t have a Sonic game.

It was going to. Sonic Xtreme was planned to be the very first mainline 3D Sonic game, which is probably a sentence that was a lot more exciting to hear in 1994 than it is thirty years later. But there were too many fires that needed to be put out behind the scenes at Sega to continue development on Sonic Xtreme, and the console went without the killer app that most people really wanted a Sega console for. Imagine Nintendo going an entire console generation without a mainline Mario platformer, or Sony bankrolling a new game that isn’t a cinematic, third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter. That’s just not what these companies do. It’s all wrong. You can’t drop Sonic the Fighters or Sonic Jam’s “Sonic World” and pretend like those are good enough replacements for what was supposed to be the 3D Sonic game. The Saturn launched, bombed outside of Japan, and was unceremoniously killed in western markets within three years.

With every last ounce of power and goodwill they had within them, Sega released the Dreamcast. This time, it would be different. This time, they would have their mainline 3D Sonic game. This time, they were going to beat their competitors to the newest console generation. This time, people would be ready for it. This time, it would be Sega’s turn to reign.

The Dreamcast launched, bombed, and was unceremoniously killed within four years.

Well, it was a good run. It wasn’t, really, but at least they managed to eventually get that 3D Sonic game out. They were late to the party by about two years — missed deadlines and the cancellation of Sonic Xtreme meant that Super Mario 64 had been out for three whole years before Americans could even buy a Dreamcast — but they at least managed to finish it. After all that time, the world finally had Sonic Adventure. It was worth it, right? After everything, it had to be.

It wasn’t. The game is bad.

Sonic Adventure is ambitious, like Macbeth. It has a lot of ideas for what it wants to be, but it doesn’t quite have the ability nor the aptitude to make it all come together. Sonic Adventure is a platformer, and a pinball game, and a snowboarding game, and Panzer Dragoon, and a kart racer, and Pro Bass Fishing, and a pet simulator. It’s a clear and obvious case of “fuck it, throw it in”. Rather than one good game, Sonic Adventure is about ten different bad games, summed together in the hopes that having enough content will make people look past the fact that none of it is actually on par with games that were coming out years prior. Quantity over quality is the name of the game here, which means that it’s about four hours too long and it made me wish that I was doing something else, instead.

Sonic himself is most emblematic of this lack of focus, both because he gets the most screen time and because his stages tend to be the most widely varied. Set aside the bad pinball minigame, the fiddly snowboarding, the boring rail shooter sections (you get two, because one wouldn't have been enough!); how does the platforming in this platformer feel? The answer, as it turns out, is also bad. Sonic moves fast, and that's good! It takes him a while to get going, and he benefits a lot from going downhill rather than up. It's nice for a 3D Sonic game to at least gesture towards concepts like momentum rather than relying on the instant capital-B Boost mechanics in later entries that let you go from zero to six thousand in the press of a button. This speed comes at a cost, however, and that's the fact that the game itself can't really keep up with him.

I managed to clip directly through the world several times over the course of about the two hours I spent playing as Sonic, and I was never certain exactly what caused it. An area in the snow level sent me directly through a loop-de-loop after I hit a boost pad, so that one was easy enough to figure out; Sonic went too fast for the collision detection to keep up with. More confusing was when I floated on a wind current that was meant to transition me from Mystic Ruins to a different stage, at which point the camera jerked into the wall and Sonic voided out. I still don't know what happened there. Regardless, Sonic is too cool to follow rules, and that includes the fundamental laws of nature about solids not being able to pass through one another. I've looked it up and people say that this is primarily a problem in the DX GameCube port, but this is the version on the original Dreamcast. This is the third revision of the game. How fundamentally broken must the game logic be for two rounds of bug fixes to not catch this? I wasn't even trying to glitch it out. Clipping out of bounds for going too fast in a Sonic game was a known shippable?

Tails is largely considered to be Sonic's junior, which is funny considering the fact that he completely fucking blows Sonic out of the water at his own game. Sonic's whole thing is supposed to be that he's the fastest thing alive, which is a bald-faced lie in a world where Tails exists. Tails gets not only the benefit of being able to fly over most of the levels that Sonic has to platform through, but he also has unique-to-him boost rings that give him a fast, automatic, optimal path towards the goal. Tails can complete a level with a three-minute par in sixty seconds. He completely trivializes a game where the most difficult challenge is not clipping out of bounds when the collision gets confused. Playing as Tails is fun in the way that spawning a jet pack in San Andreas is: the joy is in cheating.

Big was up next, because I wanted to get him out of the way after everything I'd heard about his section in the intervening years since this released. Funny enough, I had a friend growing up who had the GameCube port of this game, and he used to play the fishing minigame all the time for fun. I watched him do it. It looked like a great time. I never really got a chance to try it out, because he was a controller hog, but I never really believed all of the naysayers. My friend liked it well enough, after all. What's the worst-case scenario for something like that? It's a fishing minigame. How hard could they fuck it up?

Well.

It's bad. It's real bad. It's about as bad as people say it is, but not for the reasons that they usually say it is. Apparently there was some big Game Grumps drama blow-up over the fact that Arin Hanson railed on this section and then got flown out as a mock apology by Sega so that they could all make fun of Big the Cat as part of a marketing campaign. If you don't understand that last sentence, that's okay. It's better that you don't. If you're up on your Game Grumps drama, however, people who go on the attack against Hanson claim that his gripes are only because he didn't know to hold down on the control stick to latch Froggy on the hook; had he known it, it wouldn't have been such a problem for him, and he wouldn't have been so harsh. I agree insofar in that he probably would have had an easier time with it, but I seriously doubt that time spent would be better. Shorter, certainly. I suppose that's a form of better, because it means you get to stop playing the fucking fishing minigame earlier than you would otherwise.

The problem is multi-fold. Froggy doesn't get tired the longer he stays on the hook, but Big gets tired from reeling him in. You can get a series of bad rolls (it seems random, from what I can tell) where Big's stamina drains absurdly quickly and Froggy manages to haul ass three meters in the opposite direction before you have a chance to recover even a quarter of your stamina bar. Froggy can just go and go and go, and you can be put in a position where there's no choice but to let him go without any chance of getting him back. If Froggy stays on the line too long, it automatically breaks without warning, which can be especially frustrating when you've almost got him after a lengthy struggle. The reel likes to fucking jam more often than not, which gives Froggy a free couple seconds to make distance. Froggy will refuse to take the hook if there's three meters or less of line remaining, which is really annoying during the ice stage where the hole is tiny and Froggy clings to the walls. It's probably the worst fishing minigame I've ever played, which is impressive, because I wasn't sure that it was possible to make a fishing minigame that was both this rudimentary and this bad. The nicest thing you could say about it is that this is either the first or among the first 3D fishing games to be brought to home consoles, so it's a bit more understandable for it to be complete shit. It carries a deep and terrible burden, like the sin eaters of old, or our Lord Jesus Christ before them. Big the Cat absolves us of original sin by taking it all upon himself. He ought to be canonized.

I regret not saving Big's section for last, because the following three ended up being something of a blur. As the Joker once said in Christopher Nolan's seminal 2008 film The Dark Knight, you should never start with the Big the Cat levels; the victim gets all fuzzy. What's left probably isn't very good even if you play them first, though: Amy's levels are as forgettable as they are slow; Knuckles flies better than Tails and uses this power solely to float around re-re-re-reused stages collecting emeralds; Gamma just holds forward and the shoot button and all of his levels complete themselves. This Rashomon-ass story also starts getting very old around this point, where you're watching what are broadly the same, unskippable cutscenes over and over again with only minor dialog changes between them. It's cute the first time you play as Tails and Dr. Eggman suddenly sounds like an absolute evil menace, and it's fucking annoying the third time Amy convinces someone not to kill Gamma on the deck of the Egg Carrier.

Super Sonic is a broadly boring fourth or fifth traipse through the jungle maze that culminates in the best sequence of the entire game. You finally get an opportunity to go incredibly fast down some straightaways with no immediate danger of clipping through the world. Crush 40's Open Your Heart is playing. Sonic flies along the surface of the water and bashes Chaos on the underside of his brain. It rules. It fucking rules. The second phase kicks off and is the exact same thing with worse music. Rinse, repeat, roll credits. It's a limp end to a bad game. Big the Cat is there, but he mostly just stands off to the side and doesn't have a single line of dialog, which makes me wonder why he's even here. He doesn't do anything. For the whole game, he doesn't do anything. He exists solely so Sega could shoehorn a bad fishing minigame into an already bloated, half-baked title. Fuck Big the Cat. I hope he dies. Sorry. I know it's not his fault.

What I'm ultimately left with is a small handful of decent Sonic stages, vaguely entertaining Tails stages, and a miserable experience everywhere else. Aside from nostalgia reasons — and nostalgia is a factor whose power I cannot and will not attempt to diminish — I cannot possibly understand what people see now or saw then in Sonic Adventure. It's hardly a wonder why the Dreamcast failed when its biggest flagship titles were games like this and Shenmue. Personally speaking, I wouldn't want to give the console any time of day if I was a contemporary buyer and this is what was being marketed to me. The PS2 plays DVDs. What's this have? Bleem? There are some phenomenal Dreamcast games in the back catalog that make it look like a tragedy that the system was killed the way that it was; there are games like Sonic Adventure that make me wonder how Sega even got as far as they did.

Killer soundtrack, though.

I love Half-Life 1, but up until this week I had never actually seen it through to the end. Am I a Hypocrite? Yes, but not because of that. I think Half Life 1 has a lot of peaks and valleys in terms of levels, but in all honesty I'd rather an excellent game which is occassionally bad than an overall ok or mediocre game; which incidentally gives away my opinion on its sequel.

The paradox of action games, is that they all live or die by their answer to one single question : "what happens when you're NOT shooting/stabbing/bludgeoning/rollerskating etc?". No great action game that I can think of can be ALL action ALL the time because it gets mind numbing. That doesn't mean that you need to load up your stylish action game with ancillary mechanics or a hybrid model until the store page can describe you as "action-adventure" but it means you need to think of something. RE4 to me is one of the most brilliant action games of all time precisely because it understood this : down time is important, in between harrowing, skin-of-your-teeth encounters with cultists and oddly accented spanish peasants there are quiet moments of both relieving and building back up the tension, scavenging for supplies, talking to the pirate merchant, a few odd puzzles.

Doom, the OG FPS (yeah yeah I know about Wolfenstein 3D but Doom was the real smash hit) knew this as well, for all its reputation would suggest, its not just an unending onslaught of cacodemons; there is hunting for secrets, an old id favourite and key hunting. Half Life kind of marks the evolutionary split in shooter design in this respect, both in the attempt at a new sort of immersive storytelling through following a single character without cutting away or through text dumps, and an emphasis on a more grounded take on similar material (i.e earth is invaded by fearsome creatures).

It owes a lot to its predecessors; one can hardly forget that its built on a heavily modified quake engine, but it goes for a decidedly different feel. It also answers the question mentioned at the beginning less with key card hunting or secrets, but with platforming sections and set pieces, as well as the odd puzzle and general ammo and health scavenging. There is an argument to be made, among those who would see the upcoming shift during 6th and 7th gen towards "realistic" shooters heralded by the likes of Halo and Medal of Honor as the death of the traditional subgenre now known as the "boomer shooter" until its eventual renaissance in the mid 2010s, that Half Life marks the turning point in that.

Spoilers for HL1 from here on out I guess, but c'mon, who hasnt played half life yet

Its kind of the missing link between those two currents, its both an attempt at realism, which starts with an unskippable non-combat section akin to most sci-fi B-Movies of old where 1 hour of scientists talking preceded any kind of monster/alien showing up, but you can bunny-hop through most of it. As much as silent protagonists seem to be out of fashion nowadays, it fit perfectly with the immersive narrative of Half-Life 1, where Gordon becomes an avatar of the player, both getting into the character of a scientist going to work at NOT area 51 but also how they react to the unfolding drama. Seeing the soldiers gunning down the scientists from my uninterrupted first person view was a lot more impactful that any amount of similar dramatic turning points in other games where they would have cut to a dramatic shot in a different aspect ration of Gordon looking shocked so you know to be shocked as well. Its half life 2 where this starts to become more incongruous, with a more fully characterised Gordon who apparently has seen the error of his ways and no longer shoots scientists in the head because its funny.

I suppose I should confess that the reason Half-Life 1's middle ground is appealing to me precisely because Im not much of a fan of its predecessors or successors. With both Doom and Quake I can appreciate their place in history but again, whenever the action stops in those I kind of lose interest.

Half Life 1 is definitely frontloaded in quality, which IMO is kind of common in games. I don't hate On a Rail like most people, and even Residue Processing I think is fine. Blast Pit is, well I respect the idea more than the execution, frankly. Whilst I consider Half Life to be a timeless classic, if there is one aspect that has aged horribly its the physics, ironic considering its follow-up being almost defined by its adoption of real time physics, for all of its faults, the havok engine is such an improvement upon the non-physics of pre-HL2 3D games (okay I know HL2 didn't invent physics engines). My kingdom for the stupid seesaw puzzles of half life 2 when the alternative is this system wherein pushing crates in place feels like trying to move a magnet across an ice rink by repelling it across the ground with an oppositely charged magnet. It also seems weird how much of an emphasis HL1 puts on precision platforming ( a certain infamous section in Surface Tension springs to mind ) when you're essentially piloting a Fridge on Rollerskates, which is great for combat as you bunnyhop around shooting at monsters in the face, but even the function to slowdown by holding shift still feels kinda programmed for a different game. Deus Ex has the same issue with its non-physics, and its also the one thing I don't like about it (well, that and its shit tutorial).

On this last and most recent playthrough, I finally decided to finish the game. I'd left a previous playthrough on surface tension but I made my way through the rest of the game including the infamous Xen. I wish I could sit here and join the seeming re-evaluation of Xen being "good, actually" but I think the haters are kind of right this time. Xen isn't awful, in particular though people are referring to the whole of the last part of the game set in the Xen portal world, I think the level called Xen is pretty alright. Gonarch's lair is godawful, however, a buggy, ill-conceived set piece boss fight of the worst kind. Interloper is okay, if a bit haphazard in its design, just sending an insane amount of enemies at you but also having the slow healing chambers at every step feels rushed as hell compared to the measured encounter design of the rest of the game, probably victim of the famously short development time of Xen. Nihilanth sucks, and I will take no argument against this point, its really bad.

The thing with Xen is, it almost works. Its weirdness and shitter level design arguably helps in making it feel more alien, less designed for a human to navigate it, but in practice it never really committs to this aspect enough, with the constant ammo drops around (left by previous scientists I know, still doesn't make it feel not cheap) and the health showers which heal you as well because reasons. And well, a lot of the times its not all that alien, the confusion arising less from the geiger inspired hive being made for other creatures, and moreso that the level design has communicated or implied a path forward through its structure, only to intend a different one. That bit with the holes opening intermittently in the ground springs to mind.
Aesthetically the design is great, with a combination of industrial and biologic flavour to the architecture.

The main issue though for Xen is that it feels like a climax for a different game. Through the unfolding drama of Half Life's Black Mesa incident involving government coverups, desperate escapes, scientists playing god etc. Xen doesn't really feel like a conclusion to all of that. Indeed, the game's ending, whilst a genius sequel-hook, doesn't answer much of anything. Intentionally-so, but Valve has pulled this bullshit so many times its hard to believe they'll ever provide any kind of narratively satisfying conclusion to a half life game ever (ironically, the shittest half life game Blue Shift is the only one which does this, with Barney getting to go home, although undermined by the knowledge that almost inmediately earth got invaded by an all powerful genocidal space empire). I haven't played Black Mesa, because a fan Half Life remake sounds dumb, but I have heard they make Xen last like twice as long, which seems like it would be torturous. For all my complaints I will say, Xen is mercifully short.

At the end of the day, Half Life's later half being not as good isn't really a problem for me, I'd rather have its peaks and valleys as opposed to overall ok games that I'll forget as soon as I play it. In a way, I'd argue Xen's questionable quality has helped HL1 more than hindered it, the flaws make the good aspects shine by contrast.

Writing about Immortality is extremely challenging. It's unlike anything else out there, and discussing its gameplay too much could spoil the experience. Rest assured, I'll steer clear of anything that might ruin it for you.

I can begin by explaining that Immortality is a blend of a game and an interactive movie, featuring real people.

The game begins with a video featuring an actress on a talk show. Within the first few minutes, you realize that by pausing the video and selecting a person or object, a new video will start, similar to your selection. Your task is to unlock new videos by doing this.

As you unlock new videos, you're introduced to the life and career of Marissa Marcel, a talented actress. Her story is compelling and well-crafted.

I can't reveal much more, as even how to progress in the game is a spoiler. It's not very clear to the player how to move forward. At some point, I felt satisfied with the experience and understood what I needed to do, but still struggled with how to finish. Towards the end, I became fatigued and eager to complete it.

I played the iOS version and found the controls to be unreliable at times. There was a particular video where I knew what I needed to select, but it took me about 20 minutes to do it correctly. I wouldn't recommend this version, to be honest.

One more thing to note is that the game contains explicit scenes, including nudity and sexual content, so be prepared for that.

In summary, Immortality offers a unique experience despite some minor issues. I wish the game offered clearer guidance on what the player needs to do and was a bit shorter. Nonetheless, I recommend playing it on a PC or console, avoiding the mobile version.

This thing is good, but it is also the epitome of this increasingly predominant logic that Nintendo has with its present and its past, a toymaker one, and not a craftsman who cares with affection for his games and ideas put into his creations, rather like that of a luxury company that offers disposable and immediate products with a careful presentation.

Here is the new one of the toy known as "SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD WOHHOHHUHOOO", with improvements that will make you not want to go back to the original Wii U, in fact, they do not want you to, nor will they want you to go back to this version of switch when remaster it again on their next generation of hardware.

This logic extends to the entire game itself because its approach to action, while satisfying on the spot, also reveals how little real thought went into the designers working on such a solid and simple foundation as Super Mario. 3d Land- That game was in good health, but it was addictive like pringles-.
Why is there a multitasking button [Run], [Use Powerup],[Pick Up Player]
[Throw Things/Player] on a controller with so many buttons?
Probably no one thought of it, but in 3DLand it worked, so here too, right?
Yeah, no, the truth is that it doesn't work that well. With so many different power ups that alter the way the game space is operated, objects to throw, enemies that need to be dealt with in different ways, and, most importantly, a multiplayer in which all this is multiplied and also adds the possibility picking and throwing other players to win levels in the (seemingly) funniest and most creative way... One can't rely on a multitasking button, it's just impossible. Because obviously it's not just about the actions you can perform with your character, but how those actions relate to and impact the environment, or in this case -action platforms- what the environment demands of you as a player.
And precisely that, the environment, the levels, the world, Why is this game called 3D WORLD?
Not even the world map, probably the freest interplay of all the level-structured Super Marios, offers a sense of the world. It's a minor detail, and I don't have much problem with this, I think that the sensation of the digital world is achieved through more resources than simple physical literalness, but I also think it illustrates another point that was dealt with on autopilot.
The levels capture very well the texture of super mario in my opinion: color, fluffiness, sound... Joy as a whole.
But also full of ideas that, while creative and enjoyable, are also disposable almost the moment they are presented, more articulated around the mobility/attack variations provided by the Powerups than the jump itself, and that's a problem, because if you don't get the necessary powerup in advance the level design turns out to be a little soft, and that coupled with the problems of the multitasking button leaves some absurdly frustrating moments for a game that, if it had a better interactive layout, would be even easier than 3D LAND. Apart from the moments where the game tries to create a directed action sequence in which we have to fight a boss or stay on a platform on rails while the camera beats us - you go out of frame, you're dead - they make me sick, There is no redemption there, neither here nor in almost any platform game, it is an absurd way of killing pacing.

In the end, I liked the game, and I give it 4/5 because of Bowsers Fury and also because from time to time I actively look for a Toylogic game, that is just plain fun. I will probably come back to this game with friends.

--------------------------------------
I haven't been a Nintendo believer for a decade, but this way of supercharging its sequels with mechanics that born and die in the moment which a level takes place is a super evil company move

"duh, Nintendo is a company"



Yes, but even so I would dare to say that Nintendo has not had its own ideas or approaches since the 80s. Rather, it has offered quite innovative pieces of hardware (Nintendo DS?) to share -or even take advantage of- the ideas of others producing works of studies external or minor that would enrich their own corporate image as well as their catalogs

"well, sure, but Nintendo was always like that deep down"

Extremely flawed, to be sure: the art direction and atmosphere feel like they'd have better suited an abstract narrative told largely through implication (like Heart Machine's previous game Hyper Light Drifter) than the fully voiced, dialogue-heavy story here; enemies kept knocking me to the ground or killing me during platforming sequences when I had to get lucky just to successfully attack them; and while I somewhat respect the minimal handholding aside from a few objective markers, I felt I still ended up spending too much of my playtime aimlessly wandering around for a path forward. And all that said, the excellent traversal, great art direction, and Shadow of the Colossus-meets-Journey -meets-Mario Galaxy-meets-Zelda gameplay were enough to keep me playing through the end. A qualified recommendation, but even with its frustrations, still worth trying if that mix of influences sounds compelling.

Daily Thread : The Sewing of Discontent was a pleasant surprise, a historical sewing simulator might not sound rivetting but when an accidental rip on a jacket because you were rushing to meet the quota in the incredibly tight schedule of your work day means you can't afford to pay medicine, well, there are few games which have made me more tense (in a good way).

The controls are a bit awkward at first, especially as you're thrown right into it, but I think you just have to accept that your first run is a wash and learn the basics before the real runs begin.

If you've played Paper's Please or the like the structure will seem familiar - during the day you try to sew as many pieces as possible to meet or even exceed the quota without sewing outside of the lines, each "rip" deducting 1p from your daily wages and 3 meaning game over. This of course creates a tense dilemma between going fast to meet the quota and going slow and making sure you don't mess up. It's super stressful especially at first, and I found it very compelling. I'm not even the biggest fan of the sort of "player antagonism" type of design but here I couldnt help but enjoy it, given the context and also the fact that I was actually not that bad at the sewing.

At the end of each day the budgeting portion requires you to choose how to spend your money, with rent being mandatory to not get an inmediate game over, as well as food, doctor visits if anyone is sick and finally a newspaper which progresses the story. Importantly, the Main Character, Henrietta is the only essential character, if she starves or dies of illness the game is over, but not so much the other members. You will lose the money the adults earn in their jobs but the children do not contribute, which does lead to a grim calculus when money is scarce to only feed those who provide, left to die, there is more money to go around. Of course this is where this sort of simulation of real life tragedy falls short, when it cannot account for simulation of y'know, not wanting your 3 year old child to starve even if they cannot help you out currently.

Importantly for me, Daily Thread avoids the unrelenting grim pessimism by actually having a clear goal beyond surviving as long as possible or whatever it is that happened in the Papers Please endings (I could never be assed to finish it, I think you overthrow the government or something). By buying newspapers with what little extra cash you can muster, the wave of labour organizing and reform arrives in England, and you progress from going to meetings, to paying union fees to finally organizing the world's first general strike. The satire in these newspapers is admittedly about as subtle as being punched in the jaw, but the humour helps add some levity to an otherwise grim game, and it reminded me of Imperialism(1997) so it's fine by me.

I have a couple nitpicks, the music is too loud but the only option is to turn it off, which feels like overcorrecting. Also for all the educational value the game has (I've already started to look more into chartism and the 1842 strike) there is no Bibliography! Which seems like a massive wasted opportunity, especially given that the game was developed by 3 people, 2 of which have PHDs.

Daily Thread was a pleasant surprise, and its currently on sale on steam, where as per the game's own store page "Half of all revenue from the game will be donated to Labour Behind the Label, a UK-based non-profit co-operative organisation which campaigns for workers' rights in the clothing industry". So if being put in the shoes of a victorian seamstress being crushed under the bootheel of industrial capitalism sounds like your thing, check it out

A beautiful game with lovely music and interesting sense of aesthetic. Unfortunately, that's the most I could give it. After looking for more commerce sims after having an itch needing to be scratched from Recettear. Unfortunately, this was not it. The combat is ok, but that's really the most I could give it for me, though I do think the dungeon design is mostly unique with the roguelite elements, but the combat is mostly rudimentary in my opinion. While I wasn't expecting a full-fledged in-depth combat system, given how much this game relies on going into dungeons to collect loot to sell, it felt a bit monotonous at times.

When it comes to the commerce part, it feels kind of like an after thought. The first chunk with it was good, figuring out prices and juggling low shop space with getting stuff from my inventory and chest to put on sale, but after a while it felt more like a chore than anything else, which doesn't seem like was the intended effect of running the business. Work orders you get after you start upgrading your shop feel like an afterthoughts, with the payouts feeling mostly too low for the effort/remembering to get them done. There's things like thieves to take items from your shop, but you usually only get one a day at most and they're so easily stopped it feels like a non-factor. Add in the registers that earn you extra money and decorations that give you even extra tips, and you're swimming in money.

Which is good, considering how much items and upgrades cost, but towards the end of the game I was only opening the shop once or twice just so I could get the last bit of money to get a new piece of armor and some potions, and then gunning dungeons.

It's an interesting game, but ultimately, it didn't scratch the itch I had, as much as I hoped it would.

Thirsty Suitors is an incredibly charming game with a strong emotional core brought down by its boring turn-based combat and some pacing issues. Admittedly, the combat has a fun thematic framing but on the gameplay side of things it feels really flat and uninteresting from the third fight onwards. The skateboarding is more interesting, though I found the controls a little too clunky to really enjoy it. But: I loved how overly expressive every animation was, how each of the boss fights had their own visual theme and accompanying soundtrack how the game portrays its themes of intergenerational trauma and the complexities of interpersonal relationships within marginalized communities and how much joy the game still evokes while tackling these themes. Those elements is what I'll be remember this game by, I think. And those memories will be fond ones.