My brother and I recently got the Wi-Fi router PlayStation 5 and I decided to try out Astro's Playroom, the pack-in game for the console. It is a short, cute tech demo that pays tribute to the PlayStation consoles. Loads of Easter eggs from 1st party PlayStation franchises and 3rd party franchises that have a place on PlayStation.

The platformer is solid, but the motion controls in the rocket, monkey, and spring stages can be annoying. I also do not like that you die in one hit except on the final boss. Fortunately, there are no lives in this game, so the one hit kills are not that big of a deal.

The game is very short and meant as a test for people getting this massive console.

I finally decided to play this after having it in my collection for 3 years, and out of the two Zelda games I've actually bothered to finish, this is probably my favorite. Granted it's not perfect, the image is a little blurry; the game drops frames a lot, and the new dungeon maker they added is kinda lame, but besides those little dumps this game was an absolute joy to play.

I love the new art style they gave for this game, it stands out among the other handheld Zelda games and Windwakers cartoony style; it stands alone as its own thing which fits really well for this Zelda game in particular because it's such a strange experience (for a Zelda game I mean).

I love the residents of Koholint Island, each character is so eccentric and bizarre in their own ways; but it makes each character stand out even though you barely spend that much time with most of them.

The gameplay is solid, and the music is OOOOOHHHH SO GOOOOOOOOOD, I loved the exploratory of this game, the map is somewhat big, but everything is recognizable and memorable; even if I didn't have a map I'm pretty sure I could still remember where everything was just from memory alone, map design like that is amazing.

I could probably keep going but I think you get the idea, this game is super good and I love it very much.

Link’s Awakening, a very odd game in the series even to this day.

After a link to the past basically established a lot of what the zelda series is, link’s awakening stripped a lot of it back, it kept the gameplay and many items, but there was no Ganon, no hyrule, no triforce, and not even the titular character herself.
With that said, link’s awakening is a phenomenal game, and here’s why.


Everything a link to the past did to improve the gameplay is still very much present here, with excellent use of items throughout the game, even more greatly improved dungeons, and a bunch of wacky and fun characters.
Speaking of those characters, they went all out with this one, a lot of strange npcs litter this island, like that thing from super Mario bros 2, the crocodile that eats dog food, the shopkeeper that fucking kills you if you steal something, the owl that’s just constantly appearing for like 90% of the game, fucking Mario enemies, and the telephone guy who knows more about your adventure than you do and should probably be helping you more actively than just calling you.
There’s also normal people in this game like uh………Marin, she’s a pretty great character, I just wished she was in more of the game.

I think undeniably the greatest thing about this game is its story, you start off stranded on a beach, then link is guided to get all these instruments to awaken a fish in a giant egg, from the moment you start everything seems just dreamlike, Mario enemies appearing left and right, the many strange characters, even the fact that the bosses are referred to as nightmares, it all builds up until you get to the southern shrine, which reveals the big twist, you and this island are all apart of the wind fish’s dream, and while waking up the wind fish will let you leave, the island will disappear with it.
This twist genuinely makes this game one of the darkest games in the series, knowing that all these characters will cease to exist if you wake the wind fish really just discourages you from wanting to complete your journey, after all, you’ll lose all these zany characters you meet with, it’s especially when it comes to Marin towards the end of the game, she says stuff like “when you leave, please don’t forget me”, listening to the ballad of the wind fish lyrics that Nintendo made when the remake came out makes it even darker.
But at the end of the day, you gotta wake up from the dream eventually, and move on, when you finally wake up the wind fish, the island disappears along with everyone in it, you may have lost these friends but you’ll always have the memory of them, which hey, that makes them real enough.
Oh and if you don’t die once in the game, Marin lives on as a seagull, her one wish being fulfilled, adding just a tiny bit of sweetness to an ultimately more bitter ending.


Link’s Awakening is a great game, with the way its story is told, it truly makes it one of the most memorable Zelda game simply because of how well it stands out, I highly recommend it.



Next game is Ocarina of Time, I haven’t played this bad boy in years, and this’ll be my first time playing the N64 original (I’ve always played the 3DS one), and I’m excited to finally revisit it.

I want to get this out of the way right away. I did not buy this game. I’m staying firm on my stance of if you buy this game whether preowned, brand new, or through a sketchy second hand key seller you are actively supporting the rampant transphobia that is sweeping the world right as we speak. I’m not saying you’re a bad person for playing the game or you're even transphobic, just that you decided to choose a piece of entertainment that you don’t need rather than standing with a group of individuals that need the most amount of support at this moment. In my mind you cashed in your trans ally pass the moment you put any amount of money towards this game. As I said I did not buy this game, I pirated it mostly for the sake of seeing what the whole game was about, mostly because I DO NOT TRUST other people's opinions on the game. While I’m sure their are rational people who have given good breakdowns on the game but it really doesn't help that whenever you look the game up on youtube it sends you right down the alt-right pipeline, and everyone else is either a weird gamer chud who like playing crap AAA games and calls them art, or some bozo who gets all of their opinions on media from asshates on Twitter. I also used to be a bozo who mostly just took the word of other people online rather making my own opinion, because of that I was an obnoxious turd who didn’t think for themselves; because of that I’ve tried to actively try my hardest to have my voice stand out among the crowd that way I don’t feel like just another voice in a group, which is mostly why I haven’t bother really saying anything on the conversation around this game (granted the whole conversation around this game is so fucking toxic I also wanted it to die down first).

Anyways possible damage control out of the way what are my overall thoughts on the game itself. It is just like literally every other open world AAA game; right down to what feels like copy and paste open world garbage that is tossed all around the open world. It’s literally everything I actively don’t like about other games like Gotham Knights or the Assassins Creed games, but now it has a high quality license game sheen on it. (this is a weird side note but does anyone else find it so strange that people actually expect a good chunk of licensed games to actually be high quality; or on the same bar as other AAA games. I don’t know, I just find that strange.)

I actually wanna say some positive stuff I wanna say about the game because shockingly I actually found stuff in the game I did think was honestly worth noting. The general overall look of the game is honestly not that bad, and I genuinely like how active the world feels; what I mean by that is generally a lot of open world games feel generally static and lifeless outside of a few NPCs and wildlife, because of them it generally makes a lot of them feel more empty and less engaging overall. (Assassins Creed Valhalla, Gotham Knights, Mass Effect Andromeda and so on) With this game whenever I looked I could see NPCs interacting with each other, paintings alive and moving, suits of armor getting into fights in the hallway, and all the window shops of Hogsmeade just brimming with so many different moving objects; they went so far out of their way to integrate a lot of that whimsy that the movies and books are best known for and on purely visual level it does a great job standing out among the crowd of other static AAA games (even though that’s only 2 areas of the game but I’ll get there in a bit)
Another aspect I liked was for the first few hours just being able to explore Hogwarts. I was at one point a stupid huge Harry Potter fan (don’t worry I got better) and I feel like if this game came out when I was still in middle school or elementary school I would’ve absolutely loved this game. This does tie in with how well the devs did with immersing the playing into the Harry Potter universe. (for the most part, and I’ll get to that as well)

Ok time for me to be mean again. While I did say the open world was really lively I was mostly just talking about Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. The rest of the map is literally just one big chuck of nothing but empty grassland that looks like a photo of Wales, and I don’t know about you but when I’m playing a Harry Potter game the last place I wanna be is in fucking Cardiff. On top of just looking visually bla, it also is just filled with nothing except a shit ton of boring fake BOTW puzzles that are so short and dull that they feel more like busy work then anything else. On top of all that you also have the traditional bandit camps and meaningless collectibles that feel so haphazardly scattered around the map you’d wonder if the devs really have any thought outside of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. Which honestly begs the question “why am I even bothering with all these bandit camps and other enemies?”. It’s not for roleplaying reasons since why would your average Hogwarts student even be bothering with stuff outside of their school work, and even then why are there so many dangerous dark wizards so close to a school full of kids???. I know that’s a nitpick of if this game wants to be an RPG and wants me to roleplay as my own character. I really shouldn’t be questioning the world around me to the point where I’m being taken out of it.

On the topic of the game wanting to be like an RPG let’s talk about its “RPG systems”. This game isn’t an RPG. It has aspirations with its clothing system giving you better buffet and it’s exp and leveling system; but just like almost every other AAA game it’s so fucking shallow and annoying to use it make you wonder more of why they even bothered. Like surely no one actually likes these systems right? People don’t actually think this is a deeply rewarding system to get sucked into right? I don’t know, maybe I’ve just been spoiled on actual RPGs so now I know what makes a good RPG and what doesn't but personally this shit just annoys me to no end. Since I’m talking about the game’s systems I’ll also briefly talk about the game’s combat, and in all honesty it’s just meh. From all the videos I’ve seen of the combat it looked very slow and not very engaging, and after giving it a thorough breakdown it’s not NOT engaging. All your attacks have good impact to them and combowing attacks together can feel pretty satisfying in the midst of combat; but after you really get a good grip of the combat it just gets really samey and stops evolving , becoming subpar for the rest of the game. In comparison to an older game with a similar combo filled combat system, Arkham Knight’s freeflow combat is really engaging from beginning to end because the game changes up its combat flow to keep the player on their toes. Here it just sorta gives up halfway through.

Finally I wanna talk about the game’s story and characters. Looking at the game from purely a story standpoint outside of the weirdly insured anti-semitism littered throughout the entire game. The game’s story is beyond boring and forgettable. None of the characters really sound like real people, I refuse to believe they had an actual voice director on this project because every piece of dialog sounds like it was done in one take. On top of the general story beats being shit and unengaging none of the characters you meet along your journey really feel like characters, rather they feel like pretty generic archetypes that don’t do much outside of just “being your friends” or “being your teacher/mentor”. The villains of the game are also just as one note and uninteresting, speaking of that I feel like I should bring up that anti-semitism undertones. I’m not gonna say much on the topic mostly since I don’t feel comfortable confronting it; I’m not Jewish nor do I know a lot about Jewish culture outside of a handful of holiday and the general background so I don’t really feel like I’m a well educated enough in the topic to properly dissect it in a genuine way, all I’m gonna say on the topic is regardless if you try to ignore it or just brush it off as “oh the devs probably didn’t know” no they probably did; because the general Goblin look the series has is a very well know Jewish stereotype that has been around for decades, and the Goblins in the Harry Potter books have been seen as Jewish stereotype for about as long as the movies and books have been around, and if the devs claim they at least a handful of them know about the backlash about them. It’s either that or they're a bunch of pinheads who refuse to do research on topics and just go with whatever chuds say on twitter. Another problem with the anti-semitism undertones is just how one note the evil Goblin really is. Outside of his motive to freeing Goblins from wizard oppression he will actively kill his own people just because they don’t wanna fight in his revolution or even use literally every single kind of evil underhanded means to get what he wants, which is equality??? The game makes the whole Goblin Revolution storyline feel so one note that it feels more like an in-universe piece of wizard propaganda rather than a real struggle of morals and slavery.

In conclusion it’s pretty much everything I honestly thought it was gonna be. While I do feel like most of my time was wasted I’m also glad I’ve finally gotten this game out of my system and can move on to other games that I actually like playing outside of the occasional crap game I like to rag on.