Look, the obvious needs to be said. Yes it's an RPGMaker game, yeah it's a MLP Fangame, and yeah a majority of the plot is (believe it or not) about the lesbian romance between Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash. The gameplay is super simple and shallow, the game is incredibly short (Probably like 3-4 hours MAX, and that's with doing everything in the game. It's more like 2 if you're just blitzing to the end).

But the art is alright, the writing is good, the music is at times super good, and it doesn't last long enough to be awful. If you like the fan side of MLP, it's not the worst thing that has come out of it in a while. If you feel like playing it, it sure is a game and it'll pass the time good enough.

Played the main story levels to completion front to back. Won't ever go back for the rest of the achievements here. Terrible gameplay, a level chunk generation system that isn't remotely homogenius with one another, and a very clear weight towards wanting to make a franchise for pure profit over making an actually fun video game. Which is ironic coming from Super Meat Boy, a series made by people who were focused on making a fun game first over making a money grubbing soulless corpse.

I cannot remotely describe how aggressively disappointing this game is. You wait 10 years for the shittiest autorunner imaginable with the design philosophy of taking an iconic indie game, placing an interesting idea or two into it, then shoving the most aggressively terrible design decisions into it until it chokes on them, then giving up and turning that into an auto runner. Follow that up with a delicious side of attempting to bury the entire design philosophy of the original's story with one that's categoricially worse with an additional backstory for a character that was used as a gag in the original, turning them into a recurring bit character who's only use is a shoehorned reason for the final level to exist instead of writing something interesting.

Finalize that with the chaser shot of the dev trying to serialize the series into bootlegs of other genres of games because he's done cannablizing the corpse of a ten year old gaming trend and is now just straight up ripping off other games entirely but with a poorly inserted gimmick rather than trying to make anything remotely related to the original that made the series what it's known to be because he's fully aware that he can't because he has zero perceived talent at making anything original on his own and would rather throw money at the game to make the cutscenes pretty rather than make a playable video game first.

Fallout 3 gets a really bad rap for being a worse New Vegas, and honestly it kinda deserves it? Lots of bugs, the side quests all end up being either go get a thing or go kill a thing, the colors of the wasteland aren't really that interesting, and the climax of the game is a glorified escort mission as cool as it ends up being.

THAT BEING SAID, it's still my favorite Fallout game. Yeah the level cap is stupid, but you get a perk every single level, making your character absurdly powerful by the time you hit 30. The weapons you can find in the overworld are really fun to fuck around with by that point too, and most importantly if you choose to break the game over your knee by giving yourself god mode, infinite ammo, and choose to hunt down the MIRV Launcher, you've given yourself a one way ticket to the most goddamn fun I've had in the capital wasteland in centuries. You just have to prepare to fight tooth and nail with the game to keep it from constantly crashing...

Alright here's the deal. I've played a shit ton of the original release. I love it to bits, I've got a whole thing about saying that people who give the game flak aren't giving the game the credit it deserves. I have a lot of adoration for the original game, and I can take my rose tinted glasses off of it and also say that man there are some parts that are aggressively rough around the edges. There are things that absolutely can be fixed and I fully concede that.

With that out of the way, if you think that getting this mod will fix every issue that the original had, you are dead wrong. After playing through all the levels, beating the final story, and beating expert mode, I walked away wondering who in the world this is for. And then it hit me. It's for people like me who want Shadow the Hedgehog to be a better game, and goes in and files down those sharp corners to something a bit more palatable...only to then feed you the shavings again after a little bit of time.

Some of the changes made here are absurd. Removing the key doors? Great! Those don't need to exist since most of them are useless anyways! But then you change the keys to red rings and put them in the most cryptic nonsensical locations possible, to the point where the only ones I found were either the ones that stuck out like a sore thumb, or the ones that were unchanged from the original.

Stage re-balancing fluctuates from "We removed a few enemies so now you only have to go through most of the level instead of all of it!" to "We didn't touch this stage sorry" to "Yeah we made this stage intentionally more difficult by changing it in a negatively balanced way that does nothing but make the stage worse to play!" and it's frustrating. Most of the additions play off as someone messing around with a stage editor and either saying this is great and keeping it all in or just not remembering to revert their changes before putting the stages out.

Expert mode in particular is absolutely a guilty offender of the latter of the above statement. A majority of the difficulty comes in either flooding enemies or removing jumping platforms and not providing replacements, requiring a spin dash jump. Something you'll run into and have to repeat for around 60% of the expert mode playthrough. It's evident that the people making this just wanted something that felt hard and not something that felt particularly rewarding to beat or was well designed while being difficult when you realize that they took the most annoying and difficult segments of the original expert layouts and adjust them to be even more annoying in a "Let me copy your homework, don't worry I'll change it a little" type beat way.

Now look, this adds in a lot of changes that I do like. Little tweaks here and there, and some stages play incredibly fluid and well for them. It's just a shame that if you're not a Shadow the Hedgehog super fan and think that this is your big chance to cross that black sheep off your list that this is somehow worse in some cases, and chooses to wear those poor adjustments on it's sleeve. Alas.

There's nothing more fun than riding around and tricking off of stuff in this vibrant colorful city and being reminded that this game was likely a huge part of why Sega decided to include Jet Set Radio in their big old "Wow look at our new era of upcoming games" spree at TGA2023. It feels fucking fun, dude. It's a jam to run around, it's a jam to listen to all the music, it's a jam to just explore and get all the achievements, and most importantly it's a fucking blast to look at in a world where most triple a games are terrified of the word "Pastel".

In whatever year this Early Access game comes out in, it'll be a serious fucking GOTY contender. An open world sandbox where you can sit back and do whatever you damn well please in whatever means necessary in order to complete whatever you want? Sign me the fuck up.

Some cases are short, some are long, some aren't even about murder. It's about having a damn fun time and that's all that matters in the end. That and getting an apartment and then subsequently retiring.

Everyone having something to do is great, only issue is I wish there was a more distinct day/night cycle and that the randomly generated cases had a lot more variety in them. Graffiti is mostly the same, clues are usually the same when you get them, and if that person has a roommate they honestly probably did it and therefore will never return to that apartment and be lost amongst the city never to be found. I want to see this game become a fully fledged masterpiece and I'll be patient until a person tells me it's finished.

Let's just be honest, drawing games tend to be pretty one note. Physics games doubly so. Combining the two just leads to make it more interesting but not by much. And so we have Crayon Physics Deluxe, a game that is exactly what you expect it to be on the tin and nothing more.

Repetitive soundtrack, goals that are either way too easy or absolutely not, and graphics that do the job.

Genuinely the thing that saves it is that this game is peak "I'm sick and want to play a video game" fuel. Nothing much tops it.

I swear, historical sim games are like a weirdly special thing to me, and CK is no different. It's one of those games that's always fun to boot up, fuck around, fail, go to load a save only to find out you never saved and it's all your fault, cry, and then either immediately start again or drop the game for 5 months.

It's a fuckin blast, and it feels like every time I play I get something different. Either I die in 5 minutes and have to run the empire as a 4 year old, or I keep the same monarch alive through to 80+ years old somehow by magic and a dog. Shit's crazy and I love it.

Even as someone who's known a lot of fear, the fear of being alone is crushing. Not knowing where to go, what to do, if the next area is hostile or beautiful or somewhere inbetween. And that's the beauty of Metroid Prime. It has this aura that the other games really don't have.

The trilogy follows a weird sequence. The second game focuses on the moments right before and after death. The third focuses on the moment of death and what you could do to stop it. The first however focuses mainly on a corpse after it dies, and the vultures that pick said corpse clean.

Prime has that weird aura. Where everything is dead, long dead, excluding the Space Pirate Vultures who try to pick a corpse of a planet of it's one evil yet alluring resource after it's fall. Where everything is dead, perished, except for the horrors that rose after. And where for a few moments. Where everything is quiet and away from the evil and the vultures and the dead. Where those moments of wonder and mystery give themselves up and show in the most beautiful way.

Every now and again I get the urge to play one of these funky elephant games, and I've got to fight tooth and nail to play their old versions on Newgrounds or AG, or Kongregate. And it's nice, but it's got hoops. I have no idea if anyone else does this as much as I've done since I was a kid.

Having all of these games easily accessible on Steam, for $15 which seems like absolutely pennies to have a decent slice of my childhood playable on a whim, especially with Elephant Quest being sometimes unplayable with the AG connection being mucky nowadays, I'd pay more than that just to get to play these games once let alone for years on.

I'm not sure where I'm going, I might make games, I might just sit at home and encourage other people to do what they want by throwing money at them. But this gives me hope that no matter what happens, if I do it or others, we're gonna get some special stuff. Even if all that stuff isn't directly a game starring a blue elephant.

Although if we got another Elephant game, I don't think I'd complain.

The wonderful undersea world of SB:BFBBR is great. But holy heck is it outdated in certain spots. The wonderful remaster of this makes it so much more beautiful, and so much more vibrant and personable and magnificent. The only problem with it is in certain spots it feels like it's a 2004-esque game.

They're very minor things, like animations being messed up, weird physics engine mishaps, some robots are still aggressively even more rough than the rest. The stuff such as that makes it very clear that it's a REMASTER of a game from the Gamecube era, not it's own separate thing.

However, even with that, the game is still incredibly solid as a collectathon while not feeling super super bloated. Spatulas come in often enough to keep giving the player incentive to keep playing. The boss fights are super great. The levels (for the most part) are fun to play through and the writing is really really good too.

But MAN is it a remake of a gamecube game.