"it looks different" this, "my childhood" that; my brother in christ this shit runs like dogshit on both PC and Switch, constant suttering every second or two even on minimum settings at 720p. Fourty fucking dollars for this? And immediately greeted with a "please accept this EULA to allow us to actively enable telemetry and grab your IP etc." on boot. Distracting ass giant "SKIP SCENE" prompt on ALL cutscenes, locking the cute costumes to a giant DLC bundle that's another twenty fucking dollars. Nevermind the horrendous regional pricing. Fuck off.
EDIT: LOL the DLC doesn't even include files for you to play back locally i.e. MP3/FLAC or the "digital artbook", you can only view them in-game. They literally are selling the sound test menu you could unlock in og Klonoa. Holy fuck.

I'm usually firmly "eh whatever" on remakes changing visuals etc., and while I think this is serviceable in that regard, the ogs are just better in these departments. You may prefer the new look, I don't, but it also doesn't bother me that much.
EDIT: Nevermind Klonoa 2 looks like ass. Holy shit.

I also just want to add, please for the love of god play Klonoa PS1. It's an immensely special and important game to me and emulates perfectly or otherwise you can swaptrick it on PS1. Treat yourself to something good instead.

EDIT 2: Latest PCSX2 nightly appears to run Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil just about perfectly as well LMFAO fuck this remake duology. Ryzen 7 3700x peak at about 35-40% usage and GTX 1050 Ti peaks at 60-70% at 1080p, occasional slowdown at 1440p.

Music highlight. Tim Follin, you can't save this. I can promise though, I sunk a good few hours in because the OST is great.

Really telling that this is sitting at a cool 6/10 despite most people likely never figuring out what the potions did (essential) or how to jump-grab or drop-jump. Not a single mention of the nearly frame-perfect waiting sections with oscillating spike-balls, the spawn-in death traps, or the borderline item softlock (I elaborate on this one in the description)

I'm a Zelda II defender (4/10) and I love Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (8/10) for its masterfully tight design and satisfyingly brutal difficulty, but every other chamber in Solstice by comparison is full of "gotchas" and absurdly tight windows that are made worse by the isometric view obfuscating their actual location. You can infer a lot of locational stuff, but only so much; there's a reason platformers nearly entirely avoided this perspective even back in the day, opting for either top-down or side-view.

I can't help but feel like you're better off playing one of the adventure games of the 80s and 90s instead if you want a "vibes-based exercise in trial and error."

Me proving to the chuds hate-buying Hogwarts Legacy how NOT baited I am by talking about the game I constantly tell myself I'm not going to play for days on end.

Please for the love of god my fellow gamers shut the fuck up. Everyone with half a braincel knows how dogshit the world both inside and outside of HP is, a promising series with a strong start driven deep into the ground proportional to the author's ego rocketing into the stratosphere.

There's plenty to slam this game for, it's basically what people pretend a lot of other open-world AAA games are. In a way I almost have to thank this game for putting it into perspective how good we have it when the biggest complaint we have about the state of AAA development the last half decade (referring to 2015-2020) is that the open world ones "aren't as good as Skyrim" or whatever; until this came along, anyways.

Count your blessings when you see a Horizon: Third Subtitle or whatever reboot comes next, it can be and is so much worse. Keep playing the good or even "mid" stuff and stop feeding into the cancerous discourse that goes nowhere.

I'm determined to make 2023 my Year Of Kino, so I learned about it to brace for the inevitability of forced exposure from my family likely wanting to buy it because they're long-time HP fans. I encourage everyone to try as many genres and games as possible, keep an open mind about art, and stop deliberately letting the chuds live rent free in your head over stupid shit like Harold Trotter and the Flesh Eatin' Slug Repellent.

It's actually incredible how little this feels like a Nintendo game, a lot of shit barely works and the worst part is they made us compete for squats and we're all too honorable to cheese it with lifting. My legs are screaming and the we3d didn't numb it.

NintendoLife gave a first party Nintendo title less than a 8/10.
IGN gave a first party Nintendo title less than a 6/10

Both too generous, I think.

This is below a pack-in game, and it fails to do anything better that Jackbox or WarioWare already do.

Much has been said about the historicity of Tetris and its many iterations, but I find the very original text-based graphics version from 1984 to be the most charming. If I was committed to grinding this as a pseudo-sport, to improve my logic center and simple problem-solving speed, I'd likely opt for one of the later titles, probably Tetris 2000 or something based off of that for what little I know; but I don't really care to, it's just an extremely fundamentally well-made puzzle game with a background that frequently births inspiration. Bored, and a few lines of code later... Tetris!

You can play a recreation of this 1984 original here,, as well as Tetris Holdings' tribute to the original. I prefer the presentation of the first here, but the second is good too.

Author put that swiss cheese lookin ass course with placeholder textures in cus it was their little sibling's creation and their parents said it had to be in. -0.5 star for that and some other :raised_eyebrow: courses that are either way too dim, not marked correctly or were clearly designed with only 100cc in mind.

That said, it's MK7 which imo was already one of the strongest bases for a Mario Kart with excellent item tweaks (fake box is back, can get rid of fire flower and leaf quicker now by holding L) and a mostly very solid course selection. An entire cup just being Rainbow Roads is hilarious and genuinely good. TONS of character swap options but only visible to you, and some new gamemodes I have not really tried. There's some absurd rubberbanding at times but that is not because of this mod, and it's still less offensive than N64/DS; can be mitigated if the person ahead agrees to slow down a bit.

Beaten all of the new cups 150cc with @Nowhere (12-9, I lost -0.5 star /j)

Also it has an active online community and you can do that too!! Great stuff and super easy to install, automatic if you have universal updater already.

Preface: This review and rating is based on my playthrough of Minecraft version Beta 1.2_02.

Do you remember "the first night"?

I do, on a lot of different versions and a few platforms.

I'm doing something a little different this time around; because of how dedicated Minecraft's community is especially towards its preservation, I decided to "revisit" Beta 1.2_02.

I will be referring to beta versions as b, release as r, etc.

This version is notable for being one of the last before beds were added. In this version, there's no hunger bar, no sprinting, and no beds. There is no legitimate way to skip the night or move your spawn around. What's interesting about this is that it sort of makes the base game a little more tense, because the farther you are away from spawn the more dangerous it is for you to die. It means things as simple as wanting to find another biome are actually risky, and building a base far away from spawn even moreso. (you can just press F3 and write the coordinates down to your base, but still)

That's only part of the reason I'm revisiting this version, though; it's to re-experience that fabled "first night" that very recently many in the community are lamenting it as having "disappeared" from the game, spearheaded by personality YouTubers going as far as to say the game was ruined by this change. Originally people would point at when villages were changed to contain beds, but I guess they ran out of clicks with that one and now it's about beds in general. I could go on for paragraph after paragraph about why this is asinine but the only reason I'm giving it the time of day is because it's not entirely wrong. Because of no sprinting, if you get cornered by a skeleton, odds are it will prick you once or twice without much recourse from you, the player. Oh, hm. Actually that's probably the only example I can think of that's harder here outright. Huh. There's gotta be more, right? Let's take a look at what this version actually contains, before the gradual "destruction" of the game's "real challenge".

b1.2_02 has the following biomes (excluding those mentioned to be added for b1.3 and on), as well as the Nether in its most basic form; it does not however function correctly in multiplayer (that wasn't until b1.6). Interestingly, when it was announced it was advertised primarily as a means of fast travel; encouraging larger exploration with a bit of time commitment to synchronize portals with tunnels through the Nether. This would be its only real use case aside from collecting all three blocks that came with it for building (netherrack, soul sand, glowstone) and player-made challenges. If you look at the overworld biomes though, they tend to be tightly packed together, and a few are almost indistinguishable from each other; it's also interesting how despite there being two types of trees, they both drop the same wood. Charcoal was added in this update but it shares the same texture as coal and functionality, lapis was increased from 1 per block to 4-8, iron and diamond veins were made larger throughout the worlds. No new mobs with this update, just the classic Zombie, Skeleton, Spider, Creeper, Piglins and Ghasts to keep us company.

And that's it. It's quaint, really, but was only a stepping stone for many players' worlds before beds were in it and ruined playthroughs. Shortly after, long debate about the integrity of the game sparked, with the weathered Alphachads arguing for beds' removal while Betanerds advocated for their inclusion, claiming it greatly expanded the scope of the average player's world. Just kidding, this essentially never happened and everyone loved beds, people felt free to explore in more than just cardinal directions away from spawn instead of re-rolling seeds over and over for a funny mountain near the world spawn.

So what was my playthrough of this like, let alone "the first night"? I gotta say this version is genuinely difficult, but not for the reasons you might expect. Remember, this pre-r1.9, spam click combat is a free wall against several mobs at once; this is also early beta, so the pathing on mobs was still terrible. Hitboxes are also jank, the only time I came close to dying was when I found a spider dungeon and one of them was hitting me nearly a full block away (played on Hard). Day 1, built a shelter, made torches; no afk in caves for me! Night 1, did some mining, barely found anything, tried to loot the spider dungeon; return to surface, watch the sun rise. Day 2, I get more wood and go slaughter a dozen pigs to get stacked with instant 4 heart healing, then come back to mine more. Night 2, found diamonds. Day 3 / Night 3, made it to the nether and made a safe portal shelter on the other side. Total time spent: 1-2 hour.

So what's actually difficult about this old ass version of the game? No shift clicking in item menus, and I'm serious. The lack of a proper creative mode still also bothers me, as someone who early on had a pretty evenly split amount of time between survival and creative.

I adore Minecraft, and I understand having nostalgia for aspects of it (back then I played on the ridiculously restricted Pocket Edition Alphas, which had no smelting, nether, "proper" crafting, and only 256x256 worlds when I started!!); but to remotely imply these versions is where the game peaked in almost any capacity is utterly ridiculous. If you want stakes, you play Hardcore on current release where enemies during the day can one-shot a naked player, phantoms chase down those faster than they can run in the night, and the new Warden can bring a player down to half a heart in full Netherite armor.

I think (Vanilla) Minecraft players are just getting bored/burnt out and running out of things to make clickbait videos about. To gush about any mods worth mentioning is to gush about mods made in a post-beds world, and that wouldn't fit the current narrative. If you made it to the end of this ramble, thank you. Goodnight.

Some of my favorite pieces of the Minecraft OST:
Beginning
Haggstrom
Sweden
Aerie
The End
Truthfully there's very little of the OST, both old and new, I'd ever skip.

Dark Souls 2 is like trying a different seafood for the first time as a child. Sure, you love shrimp, maybe even some lobster, but now you're presented with a dish of softshell crab. You hesitate, it looks so raw in a way. After much hesitation and pushing from your folks you take a tiny bite, and reel at just how unfiltered the "sea" is in here. There's no shortcuts around it besides completely drenching the thing in butter and salt until it becomes a vehicle for it. But of course, it's only natural for a child to develop comfort foods and breaking habits is terrifying at any age, but it is eternally childish to then proclaim it's the least seafood of the dishes you ate simply because it challenges your expectations. I won't lie and pretend softshell crab isn't particularly raw or gamey when served by itself, but it's also not a particularly offensive flavor if you already enjoy seafood anyways.

So why do FromSoft Souls vets have such a hate boner for the only goddamn entry to have the balls to change something as fundamental as healing, despite begging for them to shake things up a little? Quit whining and eat your food, it's only as cold and unfresh as you let it be.

Bearer of the curse, how little self-awareness ye retained after offing the Lord of Cinder, despite speaking of its messages y' retained none. Go then, kill another 4-5 or what have ye, y've probably already forgotten the man who begged you to just remember his name...

-
Very belated update: There is now an exe-level Deadzone fix for PC, huzzah. https://www.nexusmods.com/darksouls2/mods/1200

11/12/2023 EDIT: Apparently back in September they added one new free map, which is great! And then replied to their own post complaining about how it's a missed sales opportunity! ??? dropping half a star.


Sold over 100k in barely a month on aesthetics alone, now struggles to break 300 concurrent players in a 24hr peak. You wouldn't think this is an issue, but I promise you it is, because most of these people are playing private lobby and the few who venture out into randoms will soon be blasted by the remaining 10% of the playerbase that has already grinded out the card/character unlocks and leveled up their decks. Median playtime: 8hrs. Median playtime among my Steam friends that own it: 2-2.5hrs, excluding the half who still haven't launched the game. What's with that, huh?

Did you know the game only has like 2 songs when you're not standing by the jukebox? Most of my friends have already muted the in-game music because they play this one song on loop whenever you're not in-game; thankfully when you're in-match the music stops. Uh, it just stops. There is no music at all in-match. What's really bizarre to me given that they tweet out other artists' songs overlapped with the game but afaik they literally only play if you go to the jukebox. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. EDIT: OST has 6 songs, no idea what the other 4 would even be unless they're tucked in the jukebox.

Held back by a lot of really basic things, ordered by most important imo:
- Card unlocks are all generally more powerful than the base kit.
- Repeat card drops are fed to existing cards to level them up.
- Only 1v1 or 2v2 modes, no FFA and nothing higher even though maps can support it easily.
- Tiny map pool. The demo in February had 2 maps, the game launched with 4; none on the roadmap unless some offhand tweet mentioned it that I can't find.
- Can't rotate teams in private lobby without recreating lobby every time.
- Default/extremely basic Unity movement, no sense of weight or momentum which makes tracking anyone feel awful. (Feels extremely similar to Gunfire Reborn in this regard)
- Other characters need to be grinded out to even play as, really frustrating vibing with a design and being met with "erm, grind pls?" like uhhh okay then.
- Most of the guns feel bad imo, I feel like I'm actively downgrading myself when I swap to anything other than the default pistol besides the sniper (which might be a good thing given the card situation tbh)

Of all of the things to "go back to form" on with your FPS, including a gameplay-affecting battlepass/XP grind is not one of them. This was always one of the worst parts of playing CoD post-3 or any of the clones, like oh yeah sure just give the already experienced player mindless proximity mines and an auto shotty while the n00b gets a sawed-off. Lmfao get real.

The B-line to selling an expansion pass instead of reconsidering the unlocks at all or adding any new maps or modes is extremely disheartening, but it makes that "crazy good" 2/3 launch sale make a little more sense now I guess! Maybe I'm reading into that one too much but then there's this tweet which is uhhh??

I don't know, in a word I'd say "vapid" but that feels overly mean, but it's all I can really think of. Would love to see this get more gamemodes (FFA, KOTH, CTF) and a much higher player cap and absolutely desperately needs more maps. As it stands now? I don't know how you're supposed to get much out of this unless you love spinning a roulette endlessly while vaguely pointing in someone's direction.

Night in the Woods perfectly encapsulates how it feels to live as a socially awkward neurodivergent person in the rural-ish northeast US. The northeast, especially New England, has this air of minding their own business; sure there's pockets here 'n' there with some more outgoing personality; Jersey and the eastern portion of Mass come to mind, but other states have jokes within New England such as Vermont, the joke goes "In Vermont, they speak two languages; English, and silence." Despite that however, there's immense difficulty getting around and doing things if you have social anxiety like I do. Mae's seemingly incoherent or childish responses to different social interactions seem to mostly stem from anxiety, trauma and a yearning for a time since passed.

I played this a year before moving down the coast to the Mid-Atlantic, and the difference in culture within a country people lump together as "Murican" is pretty staggering. It feels like everyone has someplace to be, the food is similar in a homely sort of way but largely completely different dishes; most people don't know what a good chowder looks like, and chili is relatively uncommon, and hardly ever hear about anyone making stews; things that are staples of New England diet for being easy to make, cheap, hearty, and most importantly warm during the Autumn and Winter seasons. Speaking of seasons, Night in the Woods is largely associated with Autumn, and for good reason, it nails the feeling of it better than any other game I'm aware of; at multiple times during both playthroughs I found myself vividly able to imagine the feeling in the air, or the smells.

The general art direction, sound design, overall presentation is fantastic, I yearn for more games with bold, simplistic 2D art that somehow convey texture in such a masterful way through use of its soundscape in conjunction with the wonderful color design.

During my first playthrough, I found myself crying a little at a couple points in following Bea around and hanging out with her. There's a lot of subtle conversational interactions too that really struck home, both in the forced delays between some messages so you cannot just mash through them, emphasizing the time and pace of a conversation (extremely underrated in video game writing in general, any game confident in its writing should be confident enough to tell the player to read, especially when that's the main focus anyways.) and in the exact grammar used. It's not without the occasional typo or grammatical error but I find those easy to look past. I found Mae and co's pleas easy to empathize with, seeing bits and pieces of that in the people I love. I clearly remember saying about 2/3 or so through this playthrough, "Thank god I don't relate to Mae. She needs a hug."

I would come to eat those words on my second playthrough in 2020, without getting into it 2020 was a very low point for me. As I waded through the game a second time, this time following Greg, it kept hitting me; "Oh no.", I said, rather shakily. "Oh God." I said, tearing up. I saw much of myself and my life in Mae, in about the same time frame it took her as well. It hurt, it hurt a lot, and it broke me. That weekend I'd also decided to spend all of it offline except for contacting my ex to talk for a little bit before bed. I used the time to immerse myself fully in the pain I felt playing through it, watching my life and anxieties play back like a slow motion train wreck. Yet throughout all of it, the fact I saw that in there was comforting to me, a reminder that I exist and should keep existing. I didn't really cry much during this playthrough, except near the beginning when the realizations dawned on me; but when the credits rolled I spent a good half hour or so straight gently sobbing by myself.

The game makes its point the clearest imo when you hang out with Bea, because if "Proximity" means anything to you, you already know why. Despite the rather abrupt second-to-last chapter, the sheer impact of Night in the Woods changed my life, twice, for completely different reasons. I'm scared, but that's not such a bad thing.

At the end of everything, hold onto anything.

Please don't read what this actually is, just play it. It's short (20-30m?) and one of the coolest things I've ever seen come out of romhacking. Patch over at the author's profile on smwcentral.

CW: Low effort review.

The unassuming name wouldn't lead you to believe it won the Questionable Level Design Contest '23, but from the way things are phrased it, it's as if it were an easy pick! And it's not really hard to see why!

Spoilers below here.

How is this possible? LOL, absolutely genius concept, this is the kinda stuff I play video games for. How one came up with the idea of the entire game being just the map movement (with occasional bits of hybrid normal and map platforming) is beyond me; or at least I feel like it is. The individual texts for a lot of squares were humorous and some of the level design just a bit mean.

And yet, something about reaching the end of it, with the long walk and ever so faintly sarcastic text, still felt sincere. Like "yea, here's my thing." Awesome.

I must confess, I have not actually played THPS1 or THPS2 in their original incarnations (loud booing.wav) yeah I know, FAKE FAN!! But listen, hear me out, <even louder revert noises.> Yeah, didn't think you had an answer to that.

Every once in a blue moon I boot THPS3 up for various reasons, whether for a bit of nostalgia escapism (something I normally strongly avoid doing bcus I believe it to be unhealthy), or to simply refresh myself on one of the tightest series of games ever made at their peak.
Everyone's got a different favorite in these, but most agree 3 is the best (on a mechanical level) to play long-term; even over something like the relatively recent 1+2 remake, because while those levels are iconic for bringing skateboarding back into public consciousness and largely credited even for skateboarding having a place today at the Olympics, 3 is where they'd perfect the series mechanically. In the documentary "Pretending I'm a Superman", Tony Hawk mostly talks about THPS1 and THPS3, because while 2 was the gangbusters critical darling and the natural evolution of the surprising smash hit of THPS1, they somehow did it again with THPS3, and there he talks about leaning into a more arcadey approach (not that the previous titles weren't, but this basically triples the length of your average combo).

Something I think is lost in THPS1+2 is the readability of stages. Don't get me wrong, it certainly has presentation still and I'd argue it's decent, but the choice to use very heavy baked in lighting and drop shadows clashes with the direction of these games. Multiple times I was left scouring maps looking for a random circle on a wall because it blends into the shadows; this was never a problem in THPS1 through 4 except maybe finding the skate decks on maps with dark ceilings.

I'm not very fluent in being a vibe scribe, I cannot accurately relay how pure and hollistic the presentation is in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. I was there age 11-12 with a skateboard in hand because of this game, at the only skatepark I was aware of in a 50 mile radius, where some 20-something tried his damndest to teach me to ollie while never laughing at me, all because of this game. Maybe I'll pick up a board again and learn how these punks make slabs of wood orbit their body through telekinesis, but in the meantime I'll just have to settle for this.

Update: I hit 4.6m

In the unholy hours of 2-4AM, the snowstorm finally started to subside, leaving only the howling winds, soakingly humid and blistering at -29C/-20F, and about 1m/3ft of both powdery and wet snow covering 100m^2.

The only thing more numb than my hands was my mind, hardly a spark left to even be upset about the record-setting blizzard; but something else was there that had compelled me to wait so late into the night, logically I saved my energy for when the storm died down, but that was half of the truth. I didn't know what the other half was, and I still am uncertain. But I shoveled nearly all of it by myself, alone with my thoughts, the chorus of winter sweeping across the ice, and the very real threat of frostbite as I lose feeling past my wrists; only assured that they're okay because they weren't in pain and they still moved.

Then, after the front of the house was 3/4 cleared, at 3:30~AM, everything fell silent. The wind in the immediate area stopped, snow wasn't falling, nature held its tongue as the ice sat upon its throne. A courtyard I was never invited to, in which my presence felt actively unwelcome on a fundamental level, a place that I persisted through and rearranged for myself.
A primordial, humbling feeling of insignificance washed over me as the sigh of winter pushed us to the brink, that the only reason we had anything for it was due to the time we were born in, having the technology to forecast; but dangerous when the plow you rely on spontaneously broke down the week prior.

I would have cried at a time I'd forgotten how to, had I not known better to protect my face from frostbite. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

"A young bunny dreamt of a cold, open expanse, blanketed with white snow the color of their fur. It was night and the stars sung beautifully across the faint blue dusk. The bunny was the most alive in this place."

Ico has the guts to do what everything else in its kin is deathly afraid to do

No, it wasn't the minimal dialogue which contributes to an air of mystery.
No, not the constant wonderful set pieces that while largely sharing the same assets I could remember each room in the game regardless.
No, not an ACTUALLY GOOD on-rail camera which contributes to the environment feeling even more grand and mysterious.
No,

Ico turned the HUD off.

I say that only partially joking, but I yearn for more games to attempt this. The problem is that they'd have to be designed in a way that's intuitive, and the way Ico uses context sensitivity is careful and brilliant; it got a little shaky in the last leg of the game when I had to wonder "can I actually make that jump?" but the previous 5hrs had taught me to simply trust the game's direction, so I carefully lined myself up, pressed triangle, and cleared it. The game mostly does a fantastic job of making it clear enough where you can and can't traverse without making the environment look stained with neon "CLIMB HERE" platforms.

You control a boy born with horns, scorned by his village and sacrificed or sold because of his deformities; he's locked up for a while, before tremors all around knock over and break his coffin, freeing him. On the way out, he finds a girl named Yorda, whom's as pale as snow and speaks in a tongue he does not understand. Despite this, he grabs her hand and guides her along and vice-versa, revealing she has an innate ability to open the ancient fortress's sealed pillar doorways. This is where Ico begins, and where any detailed talk of the story from me ends.

The environments, while samey most of the time, are nonetheless captivating and beautiful throughout; wrought with sweeping winds bellowing over the abandoned city-fortress, accompanied only by its machinations creaking as they idly work, and seagulls finding a familiar home along the cliff-like, decrepit ledges of the fortress above the vicious sea that hammers menacingly against the base and rocks far below.

Traversal feels incredibly heavy and clunky, but not in a way that outright controls bad; I did just about everything I wanted to do without much fuss over inputs other than some careful movement, like you would if you were realistically traversing perilous scaffolding and ancient aqueducts. A pessimist would call Yorda a glorified leg shackle in this regard, and while I'd be inclined to agree in only the coldest objective sense, you could argue bringing any persons on a trip you have to wait for just makes them dead weights; is that how you evaluate your friends or loved ones? By how you may have to accommodate them on your journeys? I don't think so, not for me anyways. Do you think Yorda, who knows how the fortress is layed out, feels even a little burdened by the bumbling boy figuring it out himself since she can't explain due to the language barrier? She might, but she shows grace in allowing the boy the agency to solve it himself; only after quite some time, at most, standing in a vague direction and calling to him as a hint forward. It's a beautiful symbiotic relationship of mutual patience and understanding that allows them to communicate despite not knowing a single word from each other's tongue.

Everything about this speaks to me on a primal level.
Compassion before frustration. Understanding before knowing. Empathy before sympathy.

That is Ico.