bro we could have had a cute witch girl as the taito mascot before she got replaced by two doofy-looking dinosaurs?!?!? I love bub and bob as much as the next guy but we've been robbed here

The game itself is a charming lil single-screen arcade game. Definitely more puzzle-platformy than the action-platformy type beats that bubble bobble would go on to have. Instead of directly attacking enemies, you turn them into cakes and can only defeat enemies by either pushing their cake form off an edge or by blasting them several times while they are still in cake form. The latter half of the game gets especially difficult as there are tons of trick levels where if you go about blasting things willy-nilly you can and WILL get yourself stuck until the hurry-up-or-you-die enemy shows up and kills you, and that's a way worse way to go than just dying outright. The game likes to play with its own very strange-yet-consistent hitboxes and jump arcs so you can definitely take advantage of cheesing levels by shooting through walls and floors you probably aren't supposed to. There are 101 stages which makes the game kind of an endurance test, and the game DOES pull some bullshit by letting you continue on any level except the last 3 so if you want to actually clear this either get ready to memorize the proper way to clear each level or just use save states like the rest of our sane modern society. The level design is pretty hit-or-miss but dangit i liked the vibes so I can't say it was all bad. bring ptolemy back taito you COWARDS

Playin Relink with oomfies be like:

- Guy who plays Eugen: Proto Bahamut is a fun and fair boss to grind before we get to Lucilius
- Guy who plays Io: Proto Bahamut is a fun and fair boss to grind before we get to Lucilius
- Guy who plays Rackam: Proto Bahamut is a fun and fair boss to grind before we get to Lucilius
- Girl who plays Siegfried: I've come to make an announcement, Bahamut the gay dragon is a bitch ass motherfucker, he pierced trough my fucking armor.

Seemingly a pretty barebones system that unfolds beautifully as you play any mode other than the default 1v1 duels. These alternate modes take the little dance of one-hit-kill ducking, dodging, and shoving and ask that you apply all of them to create situations where you "fight fairly" as infrequently as possible - pushing enemies into one another, ducking under an enemy's attack that then hits their ally, deliberately whiffing an attack so that the blood on your sword flies into their face, blinding them. You pick up the basics during the 60-second tutorial, and everything afterward is about feeling out your playstyle and refining the execution: learning when you can punish a greedy attack with a similar greedy defensive option, learning to bait out and punish a charge attack, etc. There's a large list of games that could leave you with deja vu (people have mentioned Bushido Blade, Nidhogg, Hotline Miami, Sclash) but I'm not here to dock points for a familiar premise when the game delivers on its promise like this.

Hey pretty good stuff actually! They actually made the timings fit for an LCD so I found it much more playable than the first game. The songs aren't as memorable as the studio's PS1 games but I quite like the Big song tbh.

It's too bad this game was a flop and this type of game fell out of style, but when it cost $90 adjusted for inflation I really can't blame people for the lukewarm response. Parappa 1 was considered innovative, but Parappa 2 competed with quite a lot of juggernauts like DDR so the hour long runtime didn't really impress audiences. Which is a shame, since I think it still holds its own rather well next to the titans.

Also the game has Lammy in it, so automatically a 10/10 game in spirit. I was surprised just how much she was featured since I remembered her only having a 5 second cameo in the anime!

Anyway who all eating the Parappa 2 pizza with me? https://i.imgur.com/lukW4xd.png

Chapter One
A child ran off from their village, filled with rage. A petty kind of anger; one that the child would have all but forgotten about the next time you saw them. This next time would never come, though. The child disappeared and in their place stood a Destroyer.

Chapter Two
The village seemed different. Strange new people kept showing up, with pig shaped masks covering their eyes. On the surface, they went about their business and chatted like any other villager but the more mind you paid them, the more their words rang hollow. Their thoughts and jokes seemed inorganic; mass produced even. As these Pigmasks gathered in the village, the original people there felt alienated. An old man, once known for his insights and his sharp wit would get angrier and angrier, lashing out at those around him and eventually leaving. More villagers would follow suit, some of them against their will, as this community they saw as a safe haven to share things they couldn’t share anywhere else slowly but surely became part of that “anywhere else.”
Were these Pigmasks to blame for everything? Or was it merely a case of things that always infested the community finally bubbling up to the surface? And what of the Destroyer, a one-time villager, now hailed as the champion of the Pigmasks?

Chapter Three
A monkey walked through a forest with boxes on their back; head and torso fighting a fierce battle to not fall and hit the ground. This grueling process eventually became routine and the monkey’s body eventually went on autopilot. They had all this time to think about if they’ll ever move past this task and if they’ll ever have a purpose.
Did the Destroyer have the same thoughts in this same forest?

Chapter Four
Another village child was not unlike the one who would become the Destroyer. In fact, you could say that these two village children were a single entity; two sides of the same coin. The Destroyer was the head of this coin, facing up and always the topic of conversation from those who saw this “face.” The tail, stuck to the ground, reveled in the attention the head received. They took glee in seeing friends talk about the Destroyer without any clue of its relation to the one standing near them. They searched for other villagers’ words on this mysterious Destroyer and snuck into houses to see them: the praise, the insults, the natural discussions surrounding this new “symbol” of the village.
This was not healthy for the village child. But still, could you blame them? This sensation of feeling important, even if that importance was just a niche micro-celeb in a small village, was much more comforting than the cold reality of meaning nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Chapter Five
A Pigmask working in a tower was a big fan of a rock band. They were utterly awestruck at the sight of that band’s merchandise on the man that entered the tower earlier that day and could not talk about anything other than that band: expressing their love of the band’s work, idolizing the ones behind it as supposedly great people, and elevating the band to some moral paragon because of milquetoast political opinions in its songs.
The Destroyer was in the tower too, watching this Pigmask’s conversation with mere apathy if not active contempt.

Chapter Six
Sometimes, ghosts of the past appear as reminders of what will never come back.

Chapter Seven
The Destroyer pulled a needle out of the ground and felt nothing. They pulled quite a bit of these needles before but something was different this time. The act was now done only out of some perceived obligation; to the Pigmasks and villagers cheering on or to the fake images of hearts that result from the act. It was time for the last needle to be pulled.

Chapter Eight
The Destroyer laid on the ground motionless as its tail pulled the final needle on its behalf. Its supposed stardom was crushed into not even half a star.
It’s over.

A commendable effort to mix up so many different genres, which corrolate to both the plays/aesthetics, music and gameplay. Unfortunately it does come across as a big jack of all trades, master of none. In fact the controls in the game are so simple most buttons aren't used. The only real change between controls are what the B button does in each stage. That isn't to say the game, and its various styles, aren't fun - they just all feel like you're playing the tutorial stages of different games. Which I guess is also where the difficulty complaints come in. Each gameplay style has only 3 total levels, so add in to that the general Mario easiness and the game never really feels like it gets properly going before it's already ended.

As usual collecting everything 100% can add a tiny bit of challenge, but this game is very anti-completionists. Missed a collectable in a level? You have to replay the entire thing. It doesn't matter if the collectable is found in the first 10 seconds, to save it you must recomplete everything. As you might expect from a game where all the levels are done in the style of a play, you go through them at their pace, not your own, so having to redo them involves a lot of dialogue and waiting around. This is made even worse by the fact in the post-game a new collectable is added to every single stage, guaranteeing an entire second playthrough (I did 3 of the levels and in all 3 cases the new hide-and-seek guys were found within the first 1/3rd of the level. If the rest of the game is like that it just adds insult to the fact you can't quit once you find all 3).

But even with the game being easy, and going through the levels more than once being a chore, the presentation and set pieces make at least a one time run through enjoyable.

It does feel like a bit of a throwaway game that could only come out at the end of a consoles lifespan though.

My least favourite FO3 expansion is ironically the one I enjoy talking about the most because it's uniquely terrible.

On the surface it's (ostensibly - I may be putting too much faith in the writers) a straightforward parody of what was, at the time, every shooter on the market: You are simultaneously a nobody and a legend, the entire US military cannot do anything without you, and there's no real way to engage with the world beyond murdering people in linear, grey hallways.
This is only aided by the in-universe notes/audio logs that make it obvious the simulation is massively detached from reality at the behest of an insane, sinophobic American general. So it's an in-universe parody as well an out-of-universe one.

There's just one big stinky winky dinky problem:

The parody doesn't work because the core of it is what Fallout 3 already is.

Fallout 3 at its core is a game where you walk through unwieldy shooting galleries in boring environments, endlessly massacring nearly everything you come across in areas that're 99% of the time either linear hallways or intersections that lead to linear hallways.
The only meaningful difference between OA and the game it's bolted onto is that Fallout 3 very occasionally pretends to be an RPG and lets you talk to someone. Even then, 9/10 times you either kill them or having a big prompt that lets you do so.

Perhaps what makes OA so much worse is that it's a thinly-veiled excuse to deposit some loot on you. Your incentive to do the DLC isn't "see this cool place", "free some slaves", "finish the main story" or "aliens, right?", no. You're told in no unclear terms that you should do this DLC for the loot that's in the vault. That's it.

I'll speak on it in more depth when I finish the actual Fallout 3 review, but the actual rewards you get really compound the game's overall issue with loot being meaningless. Namely, OA is perhaps the only part of FO3 that features a reward dump that isn't shit. The stealth armor, winterized T-51B, shocksword and gauss rifle are all excellent regardless of one's build, and given how easy OA is they're functionally free.
But there's a lot in the vault that I can only describe as nothing more than shelf-filling garbage. Upon slogging through OA and opening it, you'll be met with uh... A Chinese Assault Rifle, some ammo for it, and a Missile Launcher, alongside lots of mines and grenades. All incredibly common loot in the wasteland, to the point where I don't blame anyone for thinking the vault is bugged when they see so much trash loot.

And, all things considered, it probably is bugged or at least unfinished. As is the norm for Bethesda games, there's a bevy of cut content for this DLC and the vast majority of it is stuff that'd fit in the loot vault - most noticeably reskins of the sim weapons but without the bloated HP. Which would still be unremarkable, but at least it'd be unique - that simulation exclusive Chinese Assault Rifle looks gorgeous.

The extra 0.5 of a star rating only comes from me having played this through Tale of Two Wastelands, which makes it less of a slog (due to your armor's DT/DR outclassing that of your enemies) and fills the vault with all the aforementioned cut content - plus some other goodies.

The only saving grace to this DLC is that it's perhaps the first and only time I've agreed with people who're fans of Bethesda's Fallout: They hated it at release, so do I.

They still hate it in 2024, and so do I.

This is one of the most creative and clever point-and-clicks I've ever played. Unfortunately, there's a large portion lampooning pay-to-win idle clicker mobile games, and the game's commitment to the bit turns that segment into a bad time, though the game recovers and ends quite strongly.

As the title states, there is no game here! Nope. Just a locked-down title screen. But while you're there, you might as well mess around to see if you can find something to do.

If you're a fan of classic Lucasarts or Sierra adventure games, and if you enjoyed the meta humor and story of The Stanley Parable, you should definitely go into this game without learning anything else! The story is fantastically clever and engrossing, and the whole thing is only about 4 hours long. I waited for a sale ($9 instead of $13) and I honestly feel stupid for waiting that long to save 4 dollars. This game is absolutely worth it at full price, though you can get it for $5 on mobile. Since the experience is mostly comprised of clicking and/or tapping, it shouldn't be an inferior experience on a phone. Just be ready for a tedious middle segment (in which the tedium is meant as a joke) that overstays its welcome a bit, and trust that the ending will absolutely be worth it.

I mean......it's good.
It's still the same game as it was on GBA only now it has more levels, new music and completely recreate cutscenes and visuals, if you liked the GBA originale I'm sure you'll like this; I'm just confused on this games mere existence. Like was their a large enough group of people that were clamoring for a Mario vs. Donkey Kong remake on switch? I know this series has it's fans but I didn't think it had a strong enough fallowing to get a remake on the same level as Kirby return to dream land or Link's Awakening.
I'm glad those people finally have a remake of their favorite 10 year old handheld puzzle platformer, if those people even exist.