30 Reviews liked by CrowBrew


For a game called Mario Tennis, Mario Tennis contains shockingly little Mario Tennis. Instead, what's here is a fully fledged tennis based RPG where you take control of a pair of original characters who join a tennis academy in the Mushroom Kingdom, and it's as awesomely weird as it sounds. Mario and crew are treated like celebrities in-game, and your goal is to work your way through the ranks to face off against them. I just described Mario Tennis: Power Tour. Go play it.

It's genuinely difficult to put into words how good a game The Thousand-Year Door is. It's not just the best Mario RPG by a mile, it's legitimately one of the greatest RPGs ever made. The writing, the visuals, the combat, the sense of adventure, it all comes together seamlessly to create an experience unlike anything else in the franchise.

Minish Cap is an often overlooked entry in the Zelda franchise, which is a shame because it's the best top down Zelda games bar none, and one of the best Zelda games period. This game is sublime, and if you've slept on it up until now I highly recommend you rectify that as soon as possible.

The first game but better. What more needs to be said? Halo 2 is everything that made Halo 1 such a success, plus a boatload of new and interesting features. Of course it doesn't hold up now, not really, but the influence this single game had on the entire games industry can still be felt to this day.

Look, it's really not that bad. I know plenty of people are down on this game because of the controls, and they're not great, but for a full 3d platformer running on a DS I think it controls well enough, and the metric TON of added content here more than makes up for the less than ideal control scheme. It's not quite as tight as the original, but I think this is a worthy remaster of the N64 game.

In my opinion, Ape Escape 3 is the first unapologetically good Ape Escape game. I enjoy 1 and 2 for their weirdness, and have a lot of nostalgia for them both, but the 3rd entry finally delivers the rock solid gameplay that was missing from the first 2 games.

Superstar Saga was a borderline masterpiece, but after all these years and all the Mario & Luigi games I'm convinced it was a total fluke, and Partners in Time was the first sign of this. To put it bluntly, this game was a huge let down, but it's not completely awful. The excellent combat from Superstar Saga is still here, and a couple of the worlds are engaging enough, but that can't disguise the overall blandness of this game.

Kingdom Hearts II is such a monumental leap in quality over the first game that it's hard to believe the same team was behind it. KH2 rules, pure and simple, and improves on every problem with it's predecessor. This, for me, is where the Kingdom Hearts franchise truly began.

Just a fun game, honestly that's all there really is to say. Admittedly this game owes some of its success to a huge drought of downloadable Xbox 360 games at the time helping it stand out, but ultimately it's just a really solid game.

Nowadays it's pretty hard to ignore the glaring issues with Oblivion, but back in the day none of them mattered in the slightest. This game felt like the future, and still manages to offer some things even modern RPGs fail to offer. It's aged like milk, but if I'm being honest that's part of it's charm.

A solid port of a solid game, with one of the dumbest titles I've reviewed so far (cry). Unfortunately there's not too much to say about the first Far Cry game, good or bad, it's just an above average FPS with an above average setting.

Side note, I've always found it amusing that the first Far Cry game was about bio-mutants with super human abilities and no other game in the franchise ever addressed that. I guess the island of superhumans just found peace?

As a teenager when this game came out I think I was far too impatient to ever really get it, but with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to see why this game is so beloved.

While I now personally think the World of Assassination trilogy is the definitive Hitman experience, Blood Money held that title for longer than some of you have been alive, and that's worth celebrating.

I will defend this game until the day I die, but it's also worth noting that this is the only Tenchu game I've ever played, so I'm not able to compare it to previous entries. Regardless, I have so many fond memories of this game, both in singleplayer and multiplayer, and think it offers a gameplay experience that still hasn't been replicated in modern gaming.

There's just simply not enough co-op stealth games, and to me Tenchu Z is the gold standard of what co-op stealth can be.

Mario 64 is the first video game I remember playing, so it's impossible for me to review it objectively. That being said, this game changed my life and I like it more than I like you.

My subjective and objective opinions of this game are at war here. Objectively, Ocarina of Time has a lot of room for improvement and it can be confusing and frustrating at times. But subjectively, Ocarina of Time is so special to me that none of the problems with it matter. I have no idea if this game holds up, because I simply cannot look at without a bias. Big ol' shrug from me on this one.