You think you're pretty good at Tetris. And then Tetris 99 happens.

I have played over 100 matches. I have finished between 2nd and 5th place about 20 times. I have only won once.

I'm counting that as beating the game.

(Review originally written in December of 2019)

I had originally posted a largely positive review of this game. I was legitimately having a good time with it, and had put about 50 hours in at the time. A few days before writing this review, I completed a Living Dex, with 400/400 catchable Pokemon sitting in my boxes. After nearly 90 total hours, I took a break from the game and had a depressing realization.

I hadn't actually enjoyed most of it.

So why did I think highly of the game at first? Was I deluding myself in to thinking the game was better than it was just because I wanted to like it? Were my 21 years of fandom blinding me to the game's flaws?

Well yes, but actually no.

For much of the game, I was filled with that sense of childlike wonder that I really crave when it comes to gaming. I was playing with my kids, and we were having a great time. But I can pinpoint the part of the game where that stopped: When we had seen all the new Pokemon.

I made a point to not look at any of the leaks, or even most of the official news releases regarding the game. I made that commitment because playing Blue Version in 1998 was the only time I had played a Pokemon game without already being intimately familiar with every Pokemon in the game. I wanted to recapture some of that sense of discovery. And it worked! Discovering brand new Pokemon regularly was incredible. I was having the best time I'd had with the series in a long time.

But that was exclusively because I was being surprised regularly. Once the new Pokemon had all been seen, the game had nothing else interesting or new to show.

I truly love Pokemon as a franchise. It's been dear to me since I was a kid. My wife and I have played Pokemon games together throughout our relationship. Now I play with my kids. And because of that, I LOVE seeing new Pokemon. And I made Pokemon Sword all about that sensation. But that only works once.

The HD facade really just hides a Game Boy game, and that feels weird. Quite similar to what I said in my review of the remake of Link's Awakening, the game feels like it should be on more primitive hardware. When a game is simple due to hardware limitations, it makes sense. Gold and Silver were incredible because they were on the friggin' Game Boy. They were MASSIVE adventures in context. Platinum and Black 2/White 2 were impressive RPGs for the DS. But once the series hit the third dimension, it felt empty. I enjoyed XY. I really liked ORAS. I had an okay time with the four Alolan games. But the simple, repetitive gameplay of Pokemon just doesn't feel fulfilling when you KNOW the hardware is capable of so much more.

I've been a Pokemon main series apologist for a long time. But suddenly, I don't know if I've been honest with myself. So why would I play through all of these games?

It's the same reason I enjoyed my first 40-or-so hours with Sword. Because I really just like Pokemon. I love their designs, I love the new moves, I love their abilities, I love evolution (and Mega Evolution, RIP), I love crafting a team of six, and I love games that give a sense of adventure. That last point is especially important. I think it’s what’s really missing from the 3D Pokemon titles. Somehow, Pokemon entered the third dimension and it made things feel smaller. Instead of opening the world up, it became claustrophobic. Instead of growing up with the fan base, the games got simpler and easier. Instead of having a region you explore, Galar is the most linear region we’ve ever had.

I dunno, man. This has been a big ol’ word vomit, and I’ll probably have to revise it later after taking some more time to think about it. But Pokemon games need to be reworked in one way or another. I don’t know if I’m quite to the point where I’ll completely skip the next game. We’ll have to see what it looks like when it comes out. I don’t even care about Dexit. I just want the games to be interesting again. Because I played this game the same way I played Pokemon Rumble World, Pokemon Shuffle, and Pokemon Picross: giving in to my compulsion to “Catch ‘em All”. And in the end, I didn’t feel happy with my accomplishment. I didn’t look back fondly on my time with the game. I felt as hollow as the games themselves.

And that really sucks.

At this point, I don’t even know what it would take for a new Pokemon game to be great. I can’t even imagine it happening. But I do still love those absurd critters. You know what Pokemon game announcement would really do it for me?

Pokemon Snap 2. (Again, review originally written in December of 2019)

I fell off Tony Hawk a bit after THPS 4, briefly tried both Underground games at friends' houses and they didn't do anything for me. But American Wasteland??? That hooked me from the start. The story mode set in L.A. is great, I loved having an overworld with missions in a Pro Skater title. It also has my absolute favorite soundtrack of any Tony Hawk game. The covers of punk classics recorded for this game are probably the best thing to ever happen to a Tony Hawk soundtrack. What a great time!

Serious Sam 4 has been out for a while on PC already, but if you're not familiar with it, imagine a Musou with guns.

My time spent mowing down aliens in the new PS5 port of Serious Sam 4 was absolutely bonkers in the best way. In the vein of Doom Eternal, this is a shooter based around constant movement. You hold still? You die. You've got to keep mobile, tearing through hordes at a surprisingly fast pace. The initial Musou vibes of the enemy waves worried me (I’m normally not a fan of the genre), but SS4 does a great job of regularly introducing new enemies and weapons to keep things interesting.

As for how the port runs, the game looks incredible on PS5, with the draw distance being astounding. The second level's Italian city scape is so vast and gorgeous, I whispered "wow" out loud like 4 or 5 times. There were some minor technical hiccups, but nothing that would detract from the overall experience. The opening battlefield scene stuttered pretty badly for the first 15 seconds but quickly caught up, and I didn’t experience any jitters like that again. More of an oversight than a technical issue, some enemies seemed to have a single voice/shout recording, so when I was surrounded by a dozen suicide bombers, their combined yelling sounded eerily similar to that Vine of someone pushing on a whole basket of rubber duck toys. The most common legitimate issue was texture pop in, sometimes having someone's face load halfway through a shot of them speaking during a cutscene. But as funny and charming as the dialogue and characters can be, you're not here for the cutscenes, are you?

There are a couple of missed opportunities with this port though. The Dualsense doesn't get any variation in rumble. It's either rumbling or it's not, so running into a wall feels the same as getting shot. The co-op is also limited to playing with other players over the internet, one player per console. This would have been a fantastic game for split-screen, so that's a bit of a shame.

But all in all, this is a great time! This feels tailor-made for people who've been playing shooters for 20+ years, but I think anyone who enjoys frantic gunplay will get a kick out of this one.

Oh and definitely set the Blood/Gore setting to Halloween. It's fantastic.