I am not qualified to talk about Tekken in any academic capacity - but I can tell you how it made me feel. And while I am going to be talking about Tekken 8 specifically, I've played 7 too and I know most of my thoughts will apply to that game too. If you want a deep mechanical analysis, look elsewhere!

The story this time around flounders, to put it bluntly. This game serves as a Jin character study, and if you enjoy playing as Jin or his devil counterpart, you're bound to have a good time! If you play as almost anyone else, you may struggle to find much to enjoy here. The campaign is short, and feels pretty rushed too. There's little in the way of unique set pieces, though one chapter experiments with the formula greatly, evoking an old mode(?) called Tekken Force, if my sources are to be believed; this chapter kinda sucks. I won't drill into it too much more, it's not what I came for and while it was a fun romp (the final fights were a wonderful spectacle), this misses the mark.

Tekken 8 is stupendously pretty, and as always, is a fantastic spectator experience for anyone. Pulling off combos feels good because the amount of effort put into the hit effects (both visual and sound) is absurd, and most rage arts and heat smashes embellish fights percectly. The music is also top notch - Tekken music rarely misses but I truly feel they outdid themselves here, with almost every stage having a heart-pounding track accompanying it. The arenas themselves amp up the hype, just one glance at Descent into Subconscious or Fallen Destiny will have impress, but the fights are accentuated by punchy stage interactions such as wall splats or floor breaks. It's all sublimely put together.

When things come to blows, I'm a Raven player. Finding a character in Tekken is a little weird; from an outsider's perspective, it's hard to differentiate most of the roster. I look at Kimberly in SF6 and I see a ninja character with setplay elements and incredible mix. I look at Jack-O in Strive and I see a minion character that focuses on snowballing with difficult setup. When I look at Tekken, I see a lot of characters just punching or kicking each other. Almost no projectiles exist, and due to the expansive kit of each character, moves tend to have some visual overlap. Instead of going off gameplay, I had to look at designs, which is when characters like Victor and Yoshimitsu stuck out to me. Raven too, but he seemed too hard. I eventually came back to him, tried him out for a while and had fun, so Raven it was!

It's tricky for me to go into training mode and press a few buttons to test out what a character does. There's about a 50:50 chance that a certain move is actually any good, and you'll spend a lot of time scrawling through menus or wikis to figure out what you should actually be pressing. Ultimately, I think this is what lead me to dropping Tekken when I did. The barrier to entry is pretty brutal, especially when your friends' interest is starting to dwindle too. What surprises me is just how intuitive the combos are, though. It takes almost no time from your first boot up to landing a string that carries your opponent to the wall. The issue then becomes finding an opportunity to hit your launchers, sidestepping or ducking your opponents pressure or figuring out what on earth a tornado is. It's all just a tad overwhelming, especially given the roster's size.

I had a great time here, and maybe I'll dip my toes back in every now and then, but watching as they add shitty feature and terrible patch notes into each subsequent update, I'm incredibly frustrated by the state of modern fighting games. If you're charging that much for a game, don't monetize it! The fact that SF6 and T8, both fantastic packages with big price tags, feel the need to dilute their content with this nonsense is disheartening.

I can't complain about Celeste 64. It's a free game that is, at the bare minimum, a bit of fun. I didn't enjoy it much though.

Lovingly crafted, the presentation of Celeste 64 defines its identity. The characters and world look fantastic, and Lena Raine knocks it out of the park again with a tiny yet powerful soundtrack.

What you do here is collect strawberries in a Super Mario 64-esque landscape. The world is small yet compact. While it only took me an hour to find everything, it's a lot of collectibles crammed into a small space. I found some strawberries a little brutal to locate, but otherwise found the pacing of locating them solid. I just don't really like how this feels to play...

Madeline can jump, climb walls and dash, but I had an unusally tricky time judging distances. The controls just feel a little too loose and unpredictable for how precise some of the platforming can get. Again, this took me an hour so nothing stumped me for too long, but I felt like I was at odds with the game's physics for that entire playtime. Usable? Sure, but nothing really stuck out to me as "great" here.

I'm not upset about that, Celeste 64 is free, it's a passion project to celebrate the anniversary of a masterpiece and that's wonderful. The context won't inflate my score, but it will allow me to recommend this to anyone. It's a quick bit of fun, and that's just fine.

I was putting off playing this romhack. Despite my utter adoration for Pikmin 2 and its caves, I felt as if a game that was just... the caves, would be a little stale. Evidently, I was wrong.

Colossal Caverns is a chaotic mess, which is brilliant. As this is essentially a rougelike, your mileage will vary massively. I had some incredibly memorable moments while playing; bosses overlapping and creating blockades, the Titan Dweevil stalking me through the entire map, long pilgrimages just to get a second type of Pikmin... it's so much fun.

This is Pikmin 2's caves at their apex, you'll be problem solving on the fly and there's never a truly correct solution. There's so much room for customization, for adapation, for shit to hit the fan. It's nonsense, but it's nonsense in the form of a Pikmin game, and I'll definitely be diving back in for seconds, thirds and fourths.