It’s so hard for me to even want to sit down and write anything about this game. I’m going to end up spending more time writing about it than there was actual content in the game. I actually really enjoy the Wii Entries to the Carnival Games series. 1 and Mini Golf I’ll still pop out to play with family and friends, they’re solid, creative, and casual family fun with a lot of customization options and a richly addicting unlock structure. The 2018 release takes all this and makes it bleh. The character models are disgusting. Why would I want to customize these gross things. The menus for customization are atrocious. And just getting into the games is a pain in the ass. Also, they’ve removed the cute hub world from the original game! Why? Now there’s no more secrets either. The mini games are almost all extremely similar, and mostly crap. You have to unlock the motion controls, which is an extremely odd choice seeing as the entire series exists because of motion controls. The normal button controls are an atrocity. Some of the worst aiming, turning, and shooting mechanics I’ve ever seen. The Wii game had everything spot on in 2008, what’s going on here? This is an atrocious cash garb, and for $20? No way in hell should you pay any money for this game, let alone $20.

NASB is an extremely fun, albeit light on content and polish Platform Fighter. In terms of roster, I’m pretty content for now, especially with the promise of free DLC in the future. Some really great picks overall, and everyone feels very unique and very fun. However, not everyone’s animations look great although the game is extremely colorful and pops visually. I think the models look quite nice overall as well. The standouts visually in my opinion are Powdered Toast Man, Lucy, Reptar, Spongebob, and Oblina. However, characters like Danny, Ren and Stimpy, Patrick, and Sandy look borderline unfinished. The jump in quality for some characters visually is absurd, and while I don’t believe it’s necessarily a turnoff in terms of wanting to play a character, it does not help attract people to said character. I’m terms of modes and content, the game feels very light. There’s no items and only one, extremely repetitive single player mode. In terms of Multiplayer modes, there’s the very basic time and stock options, and also a Sports mode. However, the sports mode is only okay and not very fun overall, with only some of the stages feeling even slightly playable with the mode. In terms of stages, there’s a very well thought out variety of them, with fun hazards and very great backgrounds. The music is decent overall, and some of the songs do stand out, but nothing incredible. The lack of voice acting and the very basic sound effects hurt the game audio wise a lot. I almost always play the game turned all the way down now because the sound is so unimportant and borderline bad. With all that, the game sounds like it should be really bad, right? Wrong! It’s extremely fun with easily the best online for any Platform Fighter currently available. The core gameplay of this game is amazing, fast paced, very expressive, and very variable between games. Each game is extremely fun, even when I’m getting mashed on by a Sandy I’m still having a lot of fun because I know I can do the same back. I love how this game does light and strong attacks, and the air dashing is awesome and wave dashing around feels great. The only problem I have with the gameplay is teching, which feels a little bit off in comparison to Smash Bros. It almost feels delayed? Weird, but everything else feels great. For the online, the rollback feels like I’m playing in person against someone with decent internet or an Ethernet cord. Sometimes people have extremely bad connections, and unfortunately you can’t see their connections before you get in game with them. The lobby system is also good, and the game having an immediate rematch button is amazing. Overall, despite the game being a little unpolished in some areas or bad in others, I’m still having an amazing time playing the game and learning all the characters. Worth $50? Not right now, but if the game ends up with 35-40 characters at the end? Heck yeah, and it’s definitely worth picking up on sale if you can.

Doom 2 is kinda a miracle. There’s no reason this old ass FPS should be any fun nowadays. And yet, everything about it just ticks. While not much is different from a visual standpoint and gameplay standpoint, Doom 2 decides to just add on top of the solid foundation of the first game, making an extremely expansive and fun game. The game only adds one new weapon, but it’s one of the greatest FPS weapons of all time. The Super Shotgun makes this game feel so good. Although it completely outranks everything about the original shotgun, I didn’t mind. It feels so good to turn a corner and gun down three or four grunts with on blast. Also worth noting are all the new enemy types. While some, like the Mancubus and Hell Knight feel slightly inconsequential, the Revenant, the Pain Elemental, and the Arch-Vile are easily some of the most important and threatening forces in the game. Every time the game threw an Arch-Vile at me I jumped. No encounter feels safe, you’re always on your toes anticipating what comes next. My only problem with this game is the midsection city levels. The feel so much like a open mess when compared to how tightly designed the Techno Levels and the Hell Levels are. Also worth noting, I’m slightly disappointed that the Wolfenstein secret level have to be censored. They’re an extremely cool addition that not many developers would have thought of in the mid 90’s, and seeing Bethesda tamper with that secret later on is very disappointing. However, Doom 2 is still a classic game, and is very much worth a play. Now I feel like I need to replay Doom 64. I must’ve missed something.

A legendary game I finally got around to playing. The original 3 Episodes of Doom are a quick, breezy, not too difficult time. Knee Deep in the Dead is a very good introduction to the game with some great, varied levels. The Shores of Hell is a fantastic follow up episode that really pushes all the game has to offer. Inferno is unfortunately a bit weird when it comes to some of its level designs, and the Final Boss is absolutely trivial. These three episodes from the original Doom combine into a pretty great game. Combat feels sufficiently speedy, and while the enemy variety is nowhere near as strong as Doom 2, Doom 1 maintains interesting enemy encounters throughout. However, Thy Flesh Consumed is absolutely the highlight of the Package. This Episode (added after the release of Doom 2 with Ultimate Doom) is hard af. While some challenges seem simple enough, there are three or so levels that just destroy your willpower. Despite this, the game is still extremely fun and overall I can definitely tell when I get to Doom 2 I need to see more level design like this.

Man I almost fell asleep far too many times playing this game. This is the low of the low in terms of boring LEGO games. It’s up there with LEGO The Hobbit and LEGO The Force Awakens in terms of boring ass movie tie-ins. It was run of the mill, easy, boring, non offensive bleck. Of all the Lego games I played this year, this is EASILY the least memorable. Yeah it’s not as atrociously designed as Indians Jones 2, but at least I remember something about the game. The coolest part of this game was the Agents of Shield DLC level that actually got some of the actors from the show for new dialogue.

Age of Calamity is a huge game with so much to do, although it’s relatively shallow in terms of being difficult or complex. There’s a lot of characters who play very different, and lots of different movesets to explore, although ultimately some characters are introduced so late into the story they feel like they’ll only become super enjoyable in the post game. Also worth noting is that two or three of the characters kind of just shatter the balance of the game. Impa, One Handed Link, and Mipha are extremely strong, and they make playing other characters feel semi trivial. Despite this, I still think a lot of the characters are fun, even if there are a couple that just completely suck and are a drag whenever you’re forced to play as them for missions. Actual levels and battlefields are huge, and it’s very fun to explore them. However, since this game is based on Breath of the wild, it has the exact same problem with Enemy variety. Once you reach your first Lynel fight, you’ve officially encountered every main enemy the game will throw at you, totaling to only about 8-10 main enemy types, which get overused to hell and back. It doesn’t really matter as much here though, because the point of the game is you’re supposed to tear through waves and waves of enemies. Not going into spoilers, I think the story is very quite good, and having this much voice acting in a Zelda game feels weird at first, but I got used to it. My biggest problems with the game are the performance and the camera. The Switch cannot handle this game and it’s very clear. In some battles the game will absolutely chug at around 10-15 FPS. This makes some precise parts of the game such as Perfect Dodges for flurry attacks and Attack Reflects much more difficult than it needs to be in these scenarios. Also, the camera really doesn’t agree with the environments it’s put in. Sometimes the biggest challenge in a fight is relocating to somewhere you can actually properly see your foe. Overall, the game is very fun and very good, and I want to go back the next chance I have. However there are a couple issues I really think could have been fixed.

This game was one of the toughest ones for me to place this year so far. Firstly the gameplay, which was an interesting mix of three different game types. The first is a side scrolling adventure game that allows you to carry stuff around underwater, dash forward to attack enemies, and get shoved around by powerful ocean currents. These sections are decent fun, although some of the hazards are really tough to gauge where it is in comparison with the fore and background. As well, during the middle hour of the game, it suddenly becomes obsessed with puzzles that are stupid and pointless and easy but take forever, which brings the pace down to a slog. The second gameplay type is runner style levels where you're on a linear path being automatically moved forward, and you have to either keep up with someone, don't get caught by someone, or don't get hit by something. These levels vary in quality, with some having pretty well defined obstacles that are challenging and fun to maneuver around, while others have completely BS obstacles that are impossible to see for multiple different reasons I'll get into more in a bit. The third style of gameplay isn't very common, and thank goodness because it is extremely annoying. There are multiple sections where you have to bounce from place to place. The controls in these sections are atrocious, the camera is always at a horrible angle to allow you to properly control yourself. It makes any level with these far more frustrating than they need to be, which brings up one of my big points against this game. There's no way in hell any kid would be able to beat this. As an adult, I beat it in about 3 hours, but as a kid there's not a chance. It simply asks things of its age demographic that I don't think they can do. And now probably the biggest, most horrible awful game ruining problem with this game is its performance. This game runs about as well as an 85 year old woman with a blindfold on in a potato sack. That is to say, this frame rate is fucking awful. Multiple different important sequences dip to below 20 or even below 10 FPS. I've never seen anything like it in a game like this, there's nothing I can even place about the game that would justify it. The game is not in any way graphically intensive enough to justify how atrocious it runs. Not to say it looks bad, its aged pretty okay, but man the frame rate blows. There are some nice positives however. Like the other Traveler's Tales Pixar games, the OST is pretty fantastic. As well, the story is told in a good way, and the amount of movie clips in the game is fantastic. At the end of the day, I struggle to say I enjoyed playing Finding Nemo, but I also can't say I hated it. There's a lot of good here that crumples under a broken game engine and some really sour gameplay types.

I’m not going to lie when I say I started playing this game to make fun of it. I thought it would be another Casper situation and just be a humongous pile of trash. Luckily the game was actually really fun. Starting with the presentation, it’s OK. It’s nothing worth writing home about really. The music is OK if a little generic. The graphics are fine for the time with the models being decent and the environment being pretty good. It does a fine job representing the world of the classic cartoon. however when it comes to actually playing the game it’s not half bad. Scooby controls with a decent sense of speed and weight and it’s really quite fun to control. He also has a pretty diverse moves that and ways to dispel enemies, which makes fights more engaging while at the same time meaning enemies can be designed more varied. The levels of them selves although short, have some pretty neat secrets and sometimes actually made me think about how to reach an area. The bosses range from OK to a boss around halfway through the game that’s actually extremely fun. I also really enjoyed the collectathon aspect of this game. Getting different snacks allowed you to increase your health, getting clues allowed you to open up different areas of the small open world in between each separate platforming level, and getting all of the trap pieces allow you to read up on the history of each monster featured in the game. The fact that it included the voice actors from the show was also really nice as well, I recognized everyone from that era of the shell from when I was a kid. Overall it’s a pretty solid package if a little short which is why I ended up grading it a little harsh.

There’s a lot of things I need to say about Valorant. Firstly, let’s talk about visuals. Valorant is an okay looking game, it’s nothing amazing like Overwatch or TF2 were on release, but I suppose it doesn’t have to be. Effects are generally very simple and telegraphed, which is completely fine. Content wise the game is hurting. There’s quite a few game modes, but gun skins are far too expensive to be considered here, and there’s no skins for characters to customize that part of the game. After a few years, the game seemingly has a pretty fleshed out roster that makes me excited to see new stuff for. In terms of Gameplay, the game both shines and struggles. The abilities are fantastic. I love the ability sets of the agents and it makes the game really fun to coordinate with people on. However, the gunplay feels mixed. Sprays feel disgusting and completely RNG, which is both a blessing and a curse and generally makes sense for tactical shooters. As a previous R6 addict, I'm not necessarily a fan of the recoil patterns in this game at times. It’s a game I’m willing to play with friends, but I think its sort of flawed and I'm not too interested in playing solo anymore. The biggest problem is that the UI is a fucking mess. These menus are genuinely atrocious and navigation of them feels horrible. The game is genuinely fun to play but I can't seem to stick to it for longer than a month at a time.

This game had no right being as fun and addicting as it was. It knows it’s simple and it knows it’s only worth $0.99, and it isn’t afraid of it. It’s an extremely simple game where you play as one of many horny Doges trying to run down a Japanese street. There’s one action, a couple cute secrets, and a bunch of funny doges to unlock. I enjoyed this far more than I should’ve, if not simply because it reminds me that games don’t need to have 15 different mechanics and 100 levels to be fun. Sometimes a game can just do one thing and be a good damn time.

Not going to Lie, I was somewhat disappointed by this game. The first and second were pretty good, but this one kinda fell off the cliff a bit. First, the pros. The spell variety is fantastic. Each spell controls different and it’s really satisfying to use them all. Similarly, the enemy variety is pretty great as well. And of course, this game has an incredible soundtrack, a personal favorite of mine. Unfortunately that’s kinda where the positives end? Negatives wise, the game is extremely short, and the ending feels rushed as hell. The visuals ultimately got worse, which hurts a lot. Quidditch is completely gone, now relegated to exclusively a cutscene. Controlling the characters got far worse, they maintain way too much momentum and it makes them feel extremely slippery. Aiming at enemies feels terrible and unpredictable, and ultimately your AI partners end up being both annoying and complete hinderances. The game is just disappointing.

Firstly? It’s good to keep in mind that this is the first game in the trilogy, despite it being based on the second movie. I suppose blame the release of the sixth generation of consoles being too much after the release of the first movie. Anyways, this game is indeed graphically and visually quite improved. Everything looks far more polished and there’s a lot less waiting around for things to happen. Hogwarts itself has not changed. It’s the same map as the second game, only this time the puzzles and secrets available are in my opinion quite a bit less interesting than the first game. Another thing worth mentioning is the absolute lack of enemy variety in this game. I can only remember 3 enemies you could actually fight, fire crabs, Gnomes, and the occasional Gargoyle miniboss. I suppose you could fight some plants but they were mostly obstacles rather than enemies. The ghosts in the second game are here, but they are lousy unavoidable obstacles that really demolish the Transfiguration dungeon. Another thing worth noting is I found the dungeons overall to be more boring and less interesting in how they were designed. One other key negative I had was the absolute over abundance of stealth sections. Almost every night had an un-skippable stealth section, and the camera angles were far worse here than in Sorcerer’s Stone. However there were a few positives I found here over the second game. I liked the spell variety, although one particular one falls to the absolute wayside and basically isn’t used outside of the challenge you get it from. Another thing that was far better here was quidditch, you actually got to play it and compete in the House Cup! Another positive note is that there’s a lot more life in Hogwarts, a lot more students around to talk to and a lot more side quests to go on. The final positive was that the final boss was far better here and made the overall package far more satisfying. Overall, quite a bit more polished but worse designed overall.

It’s no secret that I love the first four Harry Potter Games on all the consoles they’re on. However, this one stood as the one I hadn’t played up to this point. Turns out, it’s a solid installment in the series. Starting out with the negatives, firstly the visuals are a mixed bag. The game looks (and is, but we’ll get into that later) barren. There’s very few NPC’s on screen at a time, and it’s not the console I choose. The GameCube was only a little worse than the XBOX power wise. The models have not aged well, however, quite a few of the environments have, so it’s 50/50. Another negative against the game is that there were numerous bugs I encountered that halted my progress for a little bit. as well, Final Boss of the game is not good, and if you die you only respawn with a 6th of your total life bar. Seriously. This game had big issues with life management, because when you start a new level you don’t actually get your life restored. The final negative that comes into the game is that there’s a lot of waiting for excessively long animations and cutscenes to play out. Far too much of the game is spent not in control of Harry. However, past that, this game is pretty damn great. The greatest thing here is how fun Hogwarts is to explore. As you learn new spells and gain new abilities, you can basically open up the entirety of the map and explore. It’s so much fun and it really lets you take advantage of every piece of Harry’s arsenal. Hogwarts as a big giant level to explore carries this game SO HARD. It’s also extremely rewarding to collect the cards in the game because every 20 cards you collect gives you another Health Bar, up to 5 additional bars. Another great thing about this game is the dungeon design. Although simple, it really helps you get accustomed to each new ability you gain in them. Really this game is a simpler Legend of Zelda Clone, and I think I’m okay with that.