The fact Miyamoto thought that this would be the new Mario will never cease to amaze me. Don't get me wrong, pikmin are adorable, and Pikmin is an amazing game, but an RTS does not have the broad appeal of a 2D platformer !

On the game itself, it's amazing. The time limit isn't all that strict (a rythm of one part a day is easily attainable, and when you get good at managing your time you can even fit two parts into each day pretty easily) but it's simple presence makes everything have impact and meaning. If you lose Pikmin, you don't just feel horrible guilt because their adorable little faces are no longer there because of your incompetence, you now need to think about devoting time to bringing new pikmin to life. I had a few days were I took heavy losses in the early game, before you get enemies that give you 20ish pikmins at once, and those blows were tough and really hampered my progress. It's not as much of a problem in the endgame, but that final trial does make it necessary to have a solid number of Pikmin before tackling.

The difficulty doesn't just stem from the fights and losses though, it also comes from the puzzles. Some of the srequired progression will actually get the old grey matter going, my favorite example being how you move the cardboard box during the final trial. Every zone is harder than the last and will make you think about how you want to tackle every challenge, there is a real sense of progression in your master of the game thanks to its insistance on not treating you like a baby and actually believing that you can think for yourself. Pikmin 3, as good as that game is for other reasons, never really challenged me in this way and that's a shame because that game's gameplay really is deeper than the original's. In summary, Pikmin 1 is simpler in its core mechanics than Pikmin 3, but uses them to their fullest potential to make it a fairly challenging time (although don't be discouraged, I made it through the game in 23 days on my first playthrough) while Pikmin 3 has all the potential in the world but plays it too safe and, because of this, remains with untapped potential. Pikmin 1 on the other hand, is the best game it could've been with the tools given to the player.

The only real problem with the game is the pikmin's AI which is just so dumb. I lost so many pikmin to drowning because they just felt the urge to learn how to swim and rushed into water. Quality of life is not the best either, not being able to select a pikmin type to throw without holding A is a bit annoying, especially in the middle of a fight, same goes with having to individually send all of your Pikmin at one objective when future games just allow you to send all of them at once. But these are minor complaints really.

Overall, this is a great time that you can rush through on a long summer's day, to relax all while feeling productive.

A victim of its own success.

I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did — least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.

What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.

The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers — EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have — but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.

I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.

"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.

I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun — even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen — allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.

There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon — How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER — and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.

Anyway, it's pretty good.

Alan Wake II had some pretty big shoes to fill, and in many ways it is the perfect culmination of everything that Remedy has made up until this point. The combination of Saga and Alan's stories was a great narrative treat, however I couldn't full-heartedly recommend this game. The combat is an absolute slog, especially in Alan's segments. That really brings the game down, as you fight with a never ending sea of shadows.

I also can't get over just how much the game is cribbing from Twin Peaks, particularly Twin Peaks: The Return. I understand that the first game was a homage to Twin Peaks and Stephen King, but the visuals, the style of the Koskela Bros. ads, the imagery for switching realities, even down to Scratch's leather coat. It really felt like they have enough of their own great narrative to pull on here, we didn't need to see owls and end every chapter with a song like The Return did.

I will play the DLC. I am a sucker for narrative and I love Alan Wake. But I don't think this is a great game.