Super Mario Bros. Wonder is an amazing game and one of the best 2D Mario games we've ever gotten that finally mechanically & artistically advanced the series far beyond what the New Super series offered in the last decade post NSMBDS. It made me remember why I still hold the franchise very dear to my heart aside from replaying the old titles I grew up on.

The levels were fun to play through, constantly making you guess what would be next especially with the Wonder Flower being thrown in to shake things up. I also love the less is more approach with the Wonder Seeds, how you can either go for the secondary seed in each level via the Wonder Flower challenge, or go to a challenge room or two outside of levels and get rewarded with a seed that way. You actually feel rewarded and encouraged to give it your all and get everything, something that alot of 2D Marios (Classics & NSMB) never made me feel.The badge system is versatile as hell and I really like how it cracks open how you approach the game too. Controls are tight and responsive as hell too, especially with running, you no longer have that startup delay like you do in NSMB. Pure satisfaction and bliss.

The new powerups (Elephant, Bubble, Drill) are great too, even though Drill was my least used, all of the powerups felt very useful for level traversal and enemy encounters. They didn't feel situational and they all shined (alongside the Fire Flower) as great tools that all sparkle in their own ways (likely due to the game maintaining a small pool of items which I greatly appreciate). Such an enjoyable set of powerups that I personally think blow the ones from the NSMB series out of the water (Penguin Suit was cool though).

Artistically this game is beautiful, the animations are fluid and expressive, and I love the designs for the new enemies, tweaks to old ones to have them resemble their 2D art, and the characters all being so bouncy and lively in all that they do. I also love how the game took Mario's typical world tropes and ran with it on a visual level, something I wish NSMBU did. The music, while not a whole lot of it stuck with me like an earworm, was really damn good, and it feels so refreshing to hear new stuff instead of the same arrangements from NSMB the 800th time.

Bosses were a bit of a missed opportunity which is a bit of a shame cause the final boss was REALLY cool. Granted, the Mario series was never really one to have jaw dropping amazing boss fights, I feel like the best the series has provided on the platformer end are Yoshi's Island, New Super Mario Bros. DS, (and if we're counting 3D stuff), Galaxy 1 & 2. I really wish they went a Yoshi's Island approach with bosses cause I mean look at this game!! There's so much cool stuff here, how could they not have went for that?? But I digress. The boss fights we do have here are a step up from fighting the Koopalings the 5th time in a row, so I appreciate them at least doing something more to spice stuff up.

Overall, I loved this game and I'd absolutely rank it in my Top 5 Mario games most likely. I really enjoyed what Nintendo did here to breathe new life into 2D Mario and I cannot wait to see where they take it next!

My expectations were just about a solid Ace Attorney-clone and that's what I got. I was surprised by the setting and the characters however.
Music was also excellent and especially the later cases had some unique twists to them that made the experience pretty entertaining.
I enjoyed myself quite a bit and scratching that "Ace Attorney" itch is always a satisfying experience.

The ending makes me think that future installments could be very much in the works and a lot more grandiose than the first game so I'll be on the look-out for any new releases in the future.

Two decades or so later, this version of Um Jammer Lammy became completely found media and its up on the Internet Archive! Never thought I'd see the day ever since I learned about this version since middle school, but I'm so glad it happened.

Anyway, its pretty much the PS1 game but tweaked around to fit an arcade setting. There's 3 stages per difficulty, a ton of never before seen material with Joe Chin made specifically for this version of the game, and the ability to do co-op, battle, and play as Parappa in the first stage of the game, something that was initially planned for the PS1 original but was scrapped.

If you're a fan of Parappa or Lammy you owe it to yourself to check out this holy grail. It's the best thing we've gotten in years.

Tears of the Kingdom is a really weird game to talk about, because I feel like I should enjoy it a lot more than I do. I ended up playing the game for 150 hours, I ended up getting all the shrines (though definitely not 100%ing...), but I don't know that I fully enjoyed those 150 hours. There was a lot of the game that was just downtime where I was going through the motions, and it was never straight up unenjoyable, but I also don't know if I'd say that the game has 150 hours worth of content - rather that's just how long it took me to go through it.

I feel like ToTK 's content gets less interesting as you play through it. Exploring the depths was fun at the start, when fog busting was novel and it hadn't gotten tedious yet, but it got tedious by the end of the game. While there are vehicles you can use, all it does is make boring content go by faster, as there's very little interesting to discover in the depths. It's basically just currency to upgrade your battery, armor you're never going to use, and resources. It overstayed its welcome. The same can be said of exploring the sky. It was novel at first, and then the sheer amount of copy pasted islands with similar puzzles got a little tiring. Even the labyrinths suffer from the same problem. The first time I found one, and explored it from start to finish, I was amazed. It was a super novel experience. And then all three are formated the exact same way, which eats away at how interesting it was to explore them.

Building stuff was interesting in theory, but in practice I found it took way too long. You could use autobuild, but even that isn't perfect since you needed to either spend zonite or take the parts out of your inventory ahead of time, which was a little tedious. Building anything new took forever, too. The time between finding a solution, and actually executing that solution, was too long. A lot of the time I just found myself finding other ways to travel (gliding, spamming the same plane model, horse) rather than building anything novel. That aside, I don't like that it allows you to clear puzzles in such a wide variety of probably not intended ways. The feeling of "Eh, definitely not the intended solution, but good enough." is just not one that I actually enjoy, especially when that solution is so often "just use a rocket/just use a generic fan + control stick vehicle/just build a long stick or bridge."

Combat is just as fundamentally broken as it was in Breath of the Wild. I enjoy it more, because I don't feel like it's a dark hole of resources I'll never get back thanks to the fusion system, but Zelda combat should just not be about RPG numbers, at least defensively. Offensively it's mostly fine since they mix in goobers alongside the big boys, so you still get to feel yourself becoming more powerful, but defensively it's just ridiculous. You can just upgrade the hylian set for nearly no materials and just... take no damage from enemies. And conversely, it means that whenever you're wearing something other than your hylian set, you take a ton of damage, more than is probably reasonable. And since it takes forever to upgrade armor outside the hylian set, I just end up not bothering. Hell, a lot of the utility ones barely feel like they matter. The one that lets you climb in the rain barely feels like it does everything, even with the full set.

Shrines were OK. Not much to say about them, there was a lot of them, most of them had creative ideas, but they were often too short to scratch the same itch as a dungeon would. Likewise, I don't really care for the dungeons in this game. I liked the approach and build up to the dungeons almost universally more than I enjoyed the dungeons themselves. The Divine Beast style of just finding 5 things then going back to the central room to fight the boss just isn't interesting to me. At least there's more variety aesthetically than there was with divine beasts.

Story wise, it feels like the game is being held back by the way that the game is set up. The story can be found out of order when it comes to stuff like Zelda's tears or the master sword, and then conversely they're so obsessed with the idea that they have to make sure you get the story in order-ish that the cutscenes for all temples are copy pated. It's not a bad story, I like it conceptually, I like elements of it, but I hate how it's told because of the open world nature of the game.

All in all, TOTK is just a really weird game for me. I had a really good time early on, and while it never fully lost its steam (I still completed it), I also feel like I'd have enjoyed it more if I just ended the game early rather than actually going for all shrines and map completion. There was just a lot of the time where I was coasting through the game rather than fully enjoying myself.

tl;dr this fangame is great, and if you're a DKC fan you owe it to yourself to play it. Here's the Internet Archive link for it (uploaded by yours truly), comes in 3 languages and has controller support. https://archive.org/details/dkc-the-trilogy-ver.-2.1

If you're still here keep reading.

Wow, this was simply amazing and one of the best fangames I've played. Being a Donkey Kong fan, we're very passionate about the franchise, but the most we ever get with fan driven content outside of art are romhacks of the original trilogy (and it's usually DKC2 that gets that attention). Lo and behold, I stumble across this game while looking at some crazy Japanese romhacks for DKC1 & 2. Upon hearing a name I thought it was some elaborate romhack that combined the three games into one, but it was actually a fangame that remixes alot of elements and mechanics of the original trilogy, some elements from Retro's duology, and some new mechanics entirely.

This fangame was a labor of love made by an incredibly small team within the span of 7 years which is insane to think about. It has some tiny quirks here and there as expected, but the feel is really damn close to the original 3 and once you click, you click well. The levels are all designed in challenging yet fair ways, and there's 40 of them! That's crazy! Not only that there's a reward for 100% and I think that was really sweet for them to go out of their way and do.

Some are a bit easier to complete with a certain kong more than the others, but that's the beauty of it. You can still complete any level as whichever kong. This fangame rewards your mastery of the game's levels much like the Country series already did.

If you're a fan of Donkey Kong Country, please check this game out! It definitely deserves more attention for being such a quality fangame which doesn't come often for us at all. Bravo, André Productions, fantastic work.

I played the game with the toxinput analog control mod for the game, and while it definitely feels like a handicap has been lifted from the 64DS's controls, problems still persist: Long Jumps, Triple Jumps, Dives, Somersaults, and Backflips feel stiff and no longer carry that swaying free-form momentum the original had. It doesn't feel satisfying to play whether its with the analog mod or dpad controls the game shipped with.

As for the game itself I genuinely can't agree on it being better than the original. The new content it adds/modifies is cool but some of the content comes at the cost of ruining the nice flow & pacing the original had when designed for one character. I wish the new playable characters were supplementary instead of being forced into certain missions that were changed. Yeah, the cap system exists, but it just adds a layer of busywork & backtracking that messes with the pace of the game. You can't fully complete certain levels anymore because "oh look you need Wario to punch a black brick in Shifting Sand Land" or "You need Luigi to Vanish Cap to do the Mr. I mission"

These things probably won't matter to people that grew up on 64DS but as someone that played the OG and a bit of this one growing up, I always just preferred the original with it's satisfying feel and progression.

This is my second time beating 64DS since 2020 and I think I hate it more than I did 3 years ago. As a game on it's own, it's a fine time, but as a remake of SM64? I personally don't see how its better than it.