I often find myself liking a game far more when it has ambitious ideas than if it necessarily accomplishes everything it is aiming for with perfect grace. Castle of the Winds is a really good example of this sort of thing - it aspires to be something far bigger than it can truly accomplish, even needing to be split into 2 games (this is my review for that game too, lol) to fit all that it wants to be.

This is an RPG that gives you a grand storyline of revenge and takes you from massive dungeon to massive dungeon, from city to city, from world to world.... all about a screen or two away from one another, and comfortably finished in a few hours once you find a big enough sword. You can see at every seam of this game how it wanted to be even bigger and even grander, but was literally limited by the hardware it was made on. But instead of just abandoning its ambitions it trucks right along, confident in itself that perhaps, just maybe, you the player will set aside your criticizing and skepticism and join it in its own world of pretend swords and sorcery and giants.

The biggest and most fascinating part of the game is its inventory management system - while most games of this type tend to be some variation of finite slots and weight capacity, Castle of the Winds utilizes a "mass" system that allocates items as having literal dimensions that affect the limit of how much you can carry - not as a tetris grid like Diablo and its ilk, but as just a constant calculation which you can offset by putting some of your things into boxes, which themselves take up mass... It's this sort of thing that truly sets apart classic RPGs from the modern genres they spawned, the sort of aimless curiosity about things that now are so settled that any deviation is treated as "bad design" by people who have a go-to McDonald's order memorized.

Epic Games published this back in 1994 and yet even now as we approach its 30th birthday there has not been a single whisper of a remaster or remake of Castle of the Winds and this should fill you with a sense of mild irritation, like a slightly out of sync oven clock.

I have often said that no matter what your opinion may be of particular games in the series, Zelda holds the unique distinction among other franchises of its size that there is not a single canon entry that is truly a "bad game".

In this franchise with such an immense honor bestowed upon it, Wind Waker is the jewel in its crown, the pinnacle of everything that makes a Zelda game good. A grand world-spanning, swashbuckling epic adventure with exciting battles, challenging dungeons, and a riveting storyline that keep you glued to the controller from start to end. Link's Awakening was the game that introduced me into Zelda, but Wind Waker was the game that made me a true Zeldahead.

For every Zelda fan, we have The One We Started With, The Good One, and The One We Irrationally Hate In Spite Of It Being Perfectly Good. My very first Zelda game was Link's Awakening DX, which is a funny entry point considering it kind of just has fuck all to do with any of the other games and even has Mario characters in it and other wild off-the-wall shit that has given Link's Awakening something of a reputation for being the goofball one.

Well, goofball one or not it was enough to ruin my brain and make me a Zelda freak 4 lyfe. It brought together all of the real magic of Zelda into a nice compact little game for car trips; a whimsical but dark world, a wide cast of fascinating characters, and a story that makes the game paradoxically linked to several others to make dweebs that think the timeline is real constantly fight about it.

The remake was, happily, exactly what a remake should be - a modernized but fully faithful adaptation of the original game. The newer interface makes it easier to work with the items and spend a little less time doing on-the-fly juggling of common-use gear, the music is beautiful as has become a standard for Zelda, and the graphics are a charming compromise between modern 3D and the classic gameboy Zelda graphics. It feels very much like a storybook brought to life, which is an appropriate take on something so integral to my childhood being brought forth into the 20th century, happily not kicking and screaming like so many others of its ilk.

Also the dungeon building minigame was fun. Took like 20 minutes to do all the missions that tie to in-game collectibles and the rest are optional so really don't see any merit to all the whining about that. You don't have to do everything in a game, man.

If you want to talk to me about games, I consider playing all the way through Myst to be the bare minimum requirement for us to even begin to be speaking on the same wavelengths. It's the first puzzle on my mysterious island of intricate riddles.

It's very rare in games for the first pioneer at the gate to truly nail it in one go, but Myst blew everyone's balls off in '93 for the same reason it still blows peoples' balls off today and has like 35 new variants that all just change the way you walk around the worlds, because the worlds themselves are an absolute masterclass in puzzle and level design and artistry.

There's really nothing I can say about Myst as a review that hasn't been said a thousand times before, it is such a fundamental piece of my gaming thought process that even the things I could say are things that would simply emerge in my thoughts about nearly every other game I talk about. It still holds up to this day and, again, has been remastered and remade in so many formats, including ones that just have a big huge "HINT" button to let you beat Myst the same way you beat the Hardest computer at Chess, so there's no excuse to skip on it.

Also don't give those fucking guys any of the pages. Come on.

Absolute banger of a game, probably one of the all-time greats in the realm of co-op arcade shooters. Every little inch of the game oozes with personality and charm, and finding out what weapons are weaknesses to certain monsters is a blast of cartoon logic and panicked desperation.

What really sets this already excellent game so high above its peers is its sheer volume - there are 50 stages that ensure that you and your co-op buddy of choice are not going to be just blasting through the whole game in one sitting, you will be jotting down those passwords all the way to the end, and once you finish it, it won't be long before you are starting the whole thing all over again.

The triumphant return of the Battletech franchise from the shackles of IP squatting bullshit has been nothing short of glorious to behold, and Mechwarrior 5 is an incredibly strong return to glory for the beloved Giant Death Machine Sim genre.

The "driving a big mech" element of the game has been improved upon and delivers exactly what the franchise is most loved for, and the management of the mechs and your squad, while a bit limited, show a recognition of the deeper elements of the series that is so beloved. There's a fantastic spread of great mech choices and a few deep cuts, and the game has an ongoing timeline that parallels the in-canon history to drip in new mechs, weapons, upgrades, and variants so that you are constantly having new things to go searching for in other sectors.

Where things are a bit more mixed is the Mount & Blade style open world, randomly generated missions format. While very fun conceptually, the missions themselves are extremely limited in variety, and the difficulty scaling is frankly absurd, which makes the campaign/career format unfortunately a bit repetitious and once you purchase heavy/assault mechs the game sort of reaches its limits. There are some bespoke, constructed campaigns strewn throughout both in the base game and in several DLCs that are excellent and add a refreshing bit of variety to the formula, but they can only do so much when they are so few in number compared to the random missions that provide the bulk of the player's income and salvage.

However in spite of this the game has everything going for it, and it bodes extremely well for the future of the franchise.

An incredibly rich world of intrigue and corruption where you must unravel a vast conspiracy and solve mysteries in a medieval European setting. The investigations are exciting and interrogation of suspects and gathering evidence is a lot of fun. The not-quite-Catholic world that the game takes place in is a fascinating setting and every single item in the game has extensive lore that expounds upon the larger world and its history, and you will probably spend more than a few hours just gazing at every single little object you find to learn more.

Unfortunately, the other 90% of the game is a terrible nightmare of bad combat, bad encounter design, bad creature balance, and bad dungeons that will take you a fucking eternity to clear, even with cheats which are probably the only way to make the tedious chore of the dungeon crawling bearable. You also have no choice but to clear every single one because that's where the necessary evidence or characters or boss encounters are to advance the good part of the game and return to the "being an Inquisitor" part of Inquisitor.

The game took 10 years to make and 3 more to translate it all into English and if you try to play it cleanly you will be fighting those awful dungeons for 10 years too