Genuinely the most exhausted I've felt after beating a fantasy adventure game, taking the crown from Dark Souls III.

If I were meaner I'd drop 1 star but I'd be remiss not to acknowledge the technical and presentation aspects of this. As fun as it is to compare it to Gmod, it far exceeds it in many practical ways, though of course not being nearly as deep.

I don't have the energy to list out everything detail by detail but I think what killed a lot of my enthusiasm which peaked in the 10-20 hour mark (thus, spent close to 40-60 with a sense of "is it over yet?") was just the sheer lack of ambition in shrines and general quest design. For a game so heavily built around its lego pieces it sure is scared to make the player put more than 2 pieces together (and if it does, it leaves out a preassembled example 9/10 times.). There's little way to tell whether or not the shrine you're entering is worth your time, an easy "avoid" is if it's right alongside the main roads of the map, but even near the edge of the map or more far away regions I found the game reminding me for the 3rd time post-tutorial how to throw an item or how to stack objects. Late into the game I just started skipping shrines wholesale, unless they were convenient for fast travel i.e. in the sky islands or mazes or I just had a REALLY good feeling they'd be at least decent.

In many ways the Zonai stuff was the most consistently disappointing to me, with much of the slog of the game wrapping around to it. I scraped by with only 5 notches of battery(!!!) for 90% of my playthrough and felt like I had more than enough breathing room for any puzzles, bordering on bypassing many outright due to headroom. I said this shortly after leaving the great sky island, that they should have doubled charge capacity as a baseline; and I think they agree because any zonai task that looks like it'd ask for more also has batteries lying around to offset anyone who has an unupgraded charge.

By the time I wanted the game to be over it just kept sending me on absurdly long fetch quests. It might sound silly but do you know how often I completed a temple or major questline and thought "man I could've replayed Ico"? A lot more than just once lol. That's a new feeling for me really, in regards to singleplayer games; I may joke about it but I'm almost never serious if it's anything legitimate, but I really felt that here. In many ways I just don't think the game respects the players time, and I don't mean in an endearing / engaging way like you'd see in Demon's Souls or Faster Than Light. It doesn't help by this point it repeats the shit out of bosses in a way that would make Elden Ring blush, and unlike Elden Ring there's no easy way to tell if what you're doing is underpowered vs you based on map location; it feels arbitrary,

Really where this game shines is.. where most 3D Zeldas shine, which is the world and characters. and to that end it's very good imo. The music is also mostly lovely. I'm now too tired to write more, kind of like the average shrine quality walking from the outer tenth of the map inwards.

For the longest time I refused to acknowledge this as a "Mario game" because it barely has anything in common with them aside from the annoying little shit screeching every time I so much as graze a thorn bush. Alas, it does share more similarities with traditional Mario games than I'd wanted it to, mainly in how little music there actually is. What music it has is typically very good, but by area 3 I was getting tired of it.

There's also some really janky interactions like if an enemy hits me and makes me spin, I'll stop at the ledge, only for Yoshi to go flying off the side at mach 3 once he's actionable again, sending me plummeting to my death.

It also has some of the worst mandatory autoscrollers I've ever seen in a 2D platformer, one of which has almost no checkpoints at all in the part that matters.

It also gives SMB3 and SMW a run for their money for most pathetic bosses, with the potted one in particular feeling less like a boss and more like a deliberate joke, whereupon entering I immediately held right, and just held right, and before I knew it the fight was over. Just hold the one input. :|

That's all for outright negatives, a more middlig thing to me is just the pacing of the game difficulty/level design-wise. It feels like it does next to nothing for the entire first half of the game, then when you get to world 4 there's a massive difficulty spike into the realm of what I'd have expected 2 worlds earlier, then another spike in 5-6 that feels borderline unfair at times. I can't imagine going for the 100% in this legitimately.

On the brighter side of things, I fucking love Yoshi. I'm probably the only freak on this planet who outright would rather play Yoshi's Story over Island any day of the week purely because it feels even more Yoshi-centric and heartwarming and bubbly and whimsical and more fluffy buzzwords etc. But my love does extend to this, it shares a lot of that same aura.

It should go without saying but the visual design is masterful (barring red coins being evil to find sometimes, the only outright bad choice imo), like every aspect of it. Visually it is probably my favorite SNES title alongside Super Mario RPG.

The audio design was really goofy to me, seeing sounds from SMW reused in different contexts felt so alien but gradually I not only got used to them but loved them.

I felt pretty ready to be extra mean and give this a 6 by the end of it, mainly because the game is very long in the tooth while dragging its feet for difficulty, a huge fuck-you to "The Very Loooooong Cave" in particular, which I would have appreciated as a joke in like world 3 but not near the very end of the game in world 6 :(; but the reason I'm settling in with a 7 and have half a mind to bump to an 8 is because of the final boss and credits, mostly the latter. This is top 20~ credits for me probably, tugging on strings I thought only Yoshi's Story could do in the face of such wholesomeness.

<relistens to the credits>

WHen I catch who tf made my score an 8 I'll kiss them!!

Absolutely brilliant game, top shelf from the NES but of course it also can't escape at least one NES-ism, which is how a couple of the later enemies (cough cough Bald Bull) practically need a guide.

Huge shoutouts to /u/Nowhere, who booted it up after me, raced me, and embarrassed me by beating it the same day; relaying info to me about stuff like Bald Bull and Tyson.

And of course the bearded person and photographer in the crowd for letting me know when to OHKO Honda and Bull.

Mike Tyson is a terrible fight, that's all.

Beaten via Mesen core on RetroArch w/ 2 frames runahead and 8BitDo Ultimate Bluetooth Controller (over 2.4G dongle). No save states except to skip Macho Man once I began perfecting him and fight Tyson.

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.