In a world where the only major and breathing wrestling game series is WWE 2K, Wrestling Empire is a steroid shot to the gut. It uses it's simplified engine to it's advantage, it's Superstar Mode is a far deeper dive into the mechanics than 2K has ever given us, and it's generally just a hilarious time dicking around and doing whatever and making fun characters who will implode with rapid intent.

It's great, if you want a Wrestling game and are fucking tired of WWE 2K releasing the same shit and saying it's new and unique and interesting like the Fifa Series then pick up Wrestling Empire and just have a blast. M Dickey will thank you.

Look, I'm going to be fully honest and inform you that this game gets a needlessly bad rap. Is it absurd? Absolutely. Is it needlessly edgy? Oh you bet. But that's what's so goddamn fun about it.

There's so much fun about this. There's so so much fun in this game but people can't seem to understand that past "Ooooh it's such a terrible game" when it really isn't. The absolute worst the game gets is 2 stages you can freely skip, the bosses, and the controls sometimes. You're kidding yourself out of a really fun time if you even try to give it a moment's breath. Just play into the dumb bullshit, I promise you a good time if you're willing.

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.

Princess Remedy in A World of Hurt is a very simple but very good game. Very very fun, with very entertaining dialogue, and nice music. Highly recommended, if for the simple fact that IT'S FREE! AND LOOKS LIKE A DOS GAME! SO YOU CAN ABSOLUTELY RUN IT ON ANYTHING! SO YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE!

just be careful if you're epileptic because holy shit does this game adore using flashing lights to denote anything vaguely related to fights. I've got a headache from beating this game because of that y'know, because BRIGHT FLASHING LIGHTS.

So did you like the first Princess Remedy game? Yeah it's the same thing as that one, with a few tweaks. Like two things are changed but other than that it's identical and the only reason you might wanna play it is to see what new compared to the first game, but other than that it's 5 bucks? Honestly I can see why you'd wanna pass it and to be honest adding this on 2 years later I can say without a doubt, it's hard to put any degree of incentive to put the money down for the few changes it has compared to the free game it's the sequel of.

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".

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.

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.

Persona 3: Reload is a rerelease of Persona 3 with a little bit of Persona 3:FES and Persona 3:Portable mixed in. This means that Persona 3: Reload at the time of writing is the new 3rd option when it comes to "Which version of Persona 3 is the Best Version to play?" Which is a shame. We're slowly reaching 2 decades of this argument and we still don't have a definitive answer purely because Atlus keeps doing Atlus stuff.

And it's that which keeps it down in my eyes. This should be radiant and praised and it has been! And I agree with everything everyone's saying for the most part! The music is pretty good in my opinion, the game looks stunning, the combat is fluid and fast, the new Tartarus is amazing, every social link being fully voiced is lovely, and the new systems that were added or back ported from 5 are phenomenal in this!

And yet! We're missing significant content from this release that keeps it from being the Definitive Version! We don't have the Answer, the absurdly decisive epilogue to the story that, like it's difficulty or not, is crucial for understanding what's going on in everyone's heads and why they joined the fight. And we don't have Fem!Protag, Atlus's dark horse persona character who gets as much attention as P1 and P2 do. I swear the put her in PQ2 to get everyone's hopes up then completely abandoned that arc because it would be even funnier to not finish it.

Genuinely, this is an amazing rerelease through and through. But it won't be a 5 star S Tier game until Atlus gets off their ass and finishes the content everyone's been waiting for. Even Akihiko's been waiting for this.

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.

Good game early on, very fun. But as you progress, much like every racing game, the AI's difficulty and skill is rapidly outclassed just by how good your parts get. It gets to the point in the end game where in the final area you're told to do 40+ races and they're challenging only in the way of trying to stay awake in between them. I started this game late last year and it just never got to the point of being fun once you pass stage 3.

I had fun when I first got the game as a kid but nowadays it's just a fucking slog...it's a shame.

Ultra Deluxe is a great example of just taking a game, brushing it up a bit, and repackaging it so that newcomers and veterans of the original can both enjoy it equally. It's genuinely a fantastic experience held back by the simple fact that it's a walking simulator so while the story is excellent, and the comedy is fantastic, and the point of the game is as clear as it is murky, the gameplay is still just walk from one point to another.

It's fantastic at taking a simple concept and running with it, and I cannot say anything less than it's a good game for sure.

I'll say though that the game gets very raw at certain points, it's very good and emotional but holy fuck when the game wants to try and break you with what it makes you do, or what it tells you, it doesn't hold anything back. So please definitely play with content warnings on, and absolutely skip certain endings if those endings might trigger something in you that makes you uncomfortable or wrong.

I don't think this is for everyone, let me say that right before I get into anything else. It's a mostly visual novel-esque game with lots of choice and a pretty sci-fi world map, but it might not be for you.

If you've seen some of it and you like what you see though, odds are you'll like the game as a whole. A lot of it is down to how much you like the writing and for me personally I adore it. The art style and atmosphere really bring it all together in a way that I just salivate over.

That being said, there's a lot of issues with it, mainly down to the dice choice system either being really mean or really nice, and being incredibly easy to break in half if you even remotely start to get the ball rolling stat wise. It turns from having to completely change your plans for a cycle because you didn't get the numbers you need to "Eh it really doesn't matter that I got all 1s, because a 3 is average success and I have +2 in every stat."

If you enjoy visual novels but wish there was more to do roleplay wise, I'd highly recommend this game to you. It's genuinely fantastic. Especially if you do your first run roleplaying as the Sleeper you play as and developing a personality for them as you progress. It can be really fun seeing all the results that come from it.