With BOTW 2 allegedly coming out this year, I realized that I have a pretty big Zelda backlog I need to get through beforehand. I mean, I haven't even played BOTW 1, and the only 3D Zelda I've played are Wind Waker and Majora's Mask 3D. So I'm going to be dedicating the next couple months to playing through several Zelda games, not because I need to know the lore, just because I really want to see the evolution of this series over the years, and why some games get the reputations they get.

The first thing that really pops out about Ocarina of Time is it's ambition and presentation. In my head, when you wanted to make a "cinematic experience" during this era, with big cutscenes that constantly change camera shots, a large cast of characters, and a story that feels mythological in its scope, you did that kind of stuff on the PS1. And yet they pull it off on the N64 to an impressive degree. I understand why people were head over heels in love with this game on release, it conveys the grandness of this world and story so well both in cutscenes and in the environment itself. It's funny, nowadays the word "feels like a movie" is used as an insult, but Ocarina of Time definitely borrows from film and anime in order to present its story and world, but in ways that never betray the gameplay and only enhance it. I mean, z-targeting literally adds letterboxes to the screen and it does usually make fights feel way cooler. You're doing backflips, blocking attacks, trading blows, and while the camera occasionally freaks and ruins the moment, a lot of times it really enhances the drama and scale of these fights, whether it be giant bosses or an enemy with their own sword and shield. The Dark Link fight would be raw as fuck if it were in a movie, but it's in a game and it's raw as fuck to play.

The cutscene direction really gives off this feeling of excitement the developers had over finally being able to tell a story like this, a whole new dimension for expression. There are some cutscenes where the camera just fucking swings all over the place, some that use first-person, some that cut rapidly between different shots and angles, it really has the energy of "look at what we fucking did!" I've gone on about the presentation too much already, but it can't be understated how good this game is at making this story and setting feel huge, like I said at the beginning, mytological. Ocarina of Time obviously borrows a lot from Link to the Past, but ends up feeling more like the sacred text that every other Zelda game has to respond to.

Despite this grand feeling, Hyrule Field itself kind of feels both big and small at the same time. Like, it does take a while to get from place to place on foot, but also it's very funny that Hyrule Castle is like a couple minutes away on foot from Kokiri Forest. Coming back to this feels like when you go back to your elementary school and feel like a giant, which is pretty fitting considering the whole premise of the game. It's kind of genius, the game is all about seeing the world in two different ages, the things that change and the things that stay the same despite everything, and interacting with the game at different points in the player's life changes how the player sees it. Part of me feels like I'll never really completely "get" this game the way its greatest fanatics do because I wasn't there when it came out and I didn't interact with it the way they did and still continue to.

But the thing about playing Ocarina of Time right now is that, well its kind of hard to get through its most obtuse moments knowing that later on there are games that fix them. Obviously its kind of foolish to hold an old game like this to modern standards, but throughout my playthrough there were little moments that just made me think "man, I really wanna move on to the next game". Part of it might be the fact that I know so much of what happens in this game already due to hearing about it from other people, whereas games like Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword are mostly unknown to me outside of very basic parts of their premises. Especially in the beginning, when you don't have the conveniences of adulthood, the urge to drop the game was honestly something I had to fight. While the dungeons have some cool moments and real nail their atmosphere, I didn't find many of them mechanically interesting until you get to the future.

Another thing that bothered me was the lack of substantial side stuff. This is probably a selfish expectation to put on this game, but Wind Waker and Majora's Mask have a huge amount of side things to do, in Majora you could argue that the side objectives are just as important as the main ones. But I found myself constantly going "Okay what side stuff is there to do before the next dungeon...oh nothing I guess". I love WW and Majora for their side content, so this ended being one of my biggest turn-offs for this game. I was also surprised how there wasn't that much interaction between the past and future timelines, in terms of doing something in the past to affect the future, outside of the actual story of course. I mean, there were definitely moments that did that, the Spirit Temple being one of my favorite instances of that, but I don't know, I guess I thought it would be more like the Dark World in LTTP.

But the game does do a really good job of making Adult Link feel so much more empowering and in control than Child Link. You go from every adult talking down to you to basically every NPC falling in love with you, you actually have a ride instead of walking everywhere like a high schooler with no license, and you can wear red clothes instead of the clothes your tree dad told you to wear. Plenty of great writing has been done about how Ocarina of Time portrays growing up and having to leave the innocence of childhood, so I won't try to write a worse version of those reviews. I'll just say it's all really effective and smartly done, and it being done in an N64 game with, compared to other large game stories at the time, not a particularly long script, is kind of mind-blowing.

I'm glad I finally finished this game, but I understand why I put it down several times in the past. It's a fairly bumpy road but I understand why it has the status it does, and why someone could still find a lot of value in it even when more modernized takes on this game exist. Some stray thoughts that I couldn't fit in the review:

- No wonder so many kids had this game invade their nightmares, it's terrifying and isn't afraid to just show you some fucked up shit. Honestly huge respect for never holding back on the horror and grotesque aspects.

- Water Temple wasn't as bad as it could be, but that's unfortunately because I saw a video of someone analyzing it before playing this, and while I didn't remember everything in the video, a lot of the things they brought up helped me navigate it in a way most people were not able to. Still died to Dark Link and still had a "damn it I need to find a key" moment so I still had some of The Water Temple Experience.

- Music is firing on all cylinders in this game, Kondo shows an insane range here between the Ocarina songs, the overworld themes, and the dungeon themes. Love in general how otherworldly and intimidating the dungeons present themselves as. Also being able to pitch bend on the Ocarina is so cool, it really feels like an instrument, which is something Wind Waker honestly missed out on.

You know when you’re in the queue at, like, Disneyland, or Universal Studios, or whatever, and they have those videos where Christopher Lloyd is pretending to be Doc Brown from Back to the Future or something like that, telling you about the ride you’re about to go on and doing all the little catchphrases from the movie, but it’s sorta hollow - they sound so tired, and it doesn’t last long enough to fill your time in the queue, so you keep hearing it over and over again, this same shit, for what feels like years? Maybe even decades? Yeah. Super annoying! I hate that kind of stuff.

Anyway, remember when the Nintendo Switch came out? Those were great times. Feels like forever ago since I first did a Zelda dungeon while taking a shit. That feeling when you first slid the joycons onto their rails and heard that satisfying click... Oh yeah! The little minigame in 1-2 Switch where you could feel the balls moving around in the pad? So awesome. When was that again... 2016? 2017? Five years ago?! Wow! I remember that first weekend it launched, my friend brought his with him to the pub in the pocket of his cargo pants! Crazy, right? We all played Bomberman round a table, just like in those adverts Nintendo made to promote the console, laughing and smiling and shit. So much fun. What a system. Good times, man, good times.

I'm of the mind that game controllers are rife with untapped potential to an almost comical degree; even our two-analogue + two-shoulder-triggers (etc.) standard exemplified across every major system for the past couple of decades has plenty of wriggle room to prove themselves as fructuous user interfaces, as platforms for expression and experimentation. How often are games elevated by you using an input and receiving a response you didn't quite expect, when a title is brave enough to break out of muscle-memory-worn tradition? Why are we always using the right analogue stick for the camera when God Hand demonstrated that it could be used as an omnidirectional dodge? Bumpers piss me off too, it always feels like the part games fall back on when they run out of face buttons.

Aperture Desk Job is a hardware showcase for the Steam Deck, placing the player behind a desk filled with buttons and knobs that represent an abstracted control pad, more specifically the Steam Deck button layout. but I'm honestly not sure what it's so proud of, what it's even flaunting. When all comes down to it, the game seems satisfied to give you another simulation where the left stick "moves" the player, you ready a reticle with the left trigger, and shoot with the right. It even demonstrates with a quippy section that deviations from this, let's face it, trite format are nothing more than "overengineered" amalgams begging for failure. I honestly am a little disappointed in Valve for this. While I definitely think the Steam Deck is one of the best pieces of handheld gaming hardware on the market, it doesn't do anything for interactivity the Switch doesn't do - the WiiU gamepad didn't do. Hell, the fucking Nvidia Shield.

Which, I wanna stress, is fine. I love the Steam Deck lol, it's a relatively uncomplicated means to play my Steam library "on the go" (bed), I love the freedom and the ergonomics of the pad itself are wildly comfortable. It serves its purpose just fine - it's just why I'm a little confused by... this? It does nothing, and despite reprising a fan-favourite role, it also says nothing. I wasn't even necessarily expecting Valve's take on Astro's Playroom, I simply had hoped that their generally forward-thinking design ethos would unravel a hidden truth or two, especially since they had the confidence to release this on regular PCs as well.
Oh well, it's nice to hear little motifs from the Portal 2 soundtrack again, gave me the tingles.

playing the demo for babylon's fall is a bit like watching the slow-motion death of video games occurring before your eyes. this miserable game, limping onto store shelves covered in the wounds of a visibly disastrous development cycle, is only able to offer a substantially slower, less responsive version of the combat system of a game from 2017, deliberately stripped back and wounded in order to accommodate a miserly loot grind that actively makes the game worse in order to sell to you a season pass, a battle pass, and a daily treadmill running endlessly towards a carrot labelled "the prospect that this game might eventually be fun" kept forever out of reach. it's not just a bad videogame, it's a game deliberately made worse, stripped of all potential to be good, in order to try to sucker more money and time out of you.

this is the kind of game that platinum's ceo wants to be making rather than the by-most-accounts very good Sol Cresta. what the actual fuck is going on at this company. someday there's going to be a tell-all documentary about what was going on behind the scenes at Platinum in the past decade or so and it will be one billion times more entertaining than this dreck

Watching Sol Cresta's pre-release has felt like watching a car crash in slow motion. From it's bizzare pseudo announcement on April Fools day 2020 to actually confirming it's a thing to now, the road has been rocky and it's seemed so, so much, like this was going to crash and burn. From "oh god why does it look like that", to "why is nothing happening, and where are the bullets" to "Why the fuck is it $50 no one will buy that" - the decisions have been continuously baffling.

And, as predicted, the end result is messy, buggy, looks so weirdly terrible it almost warps back round to being cool, its too expensive whilst feeling like it was made for a lower budget than most of the good indie shmups. But, well, i'm here. I put my £38 into steam with the intention of refunding it but I ended up well overshooting the refund time - because I was having a really good time.

It's really fortunate that the game's core gimmick, the docking - where you arrange your 3 craft in different formations and order - is great. It's basically straight up taken from wonderful 101's line drawing, and weaving between bullets whilst making patterns, trying to pull out the optimal formation in tight spaces and moments - it works really well. It injects the peak flow state that clover studio and platinum's very best games have into a shooting game. And whilst there's a bit of hellsinker here and a bit of radiant silvergun there, but it does really end up feeling unique, and filling a niche i didn't know I wanted. Its helped by good boss design and - after the first stage - stage designs that keep you on your toes constantly.

It also helps that the game is very likeable in other ways. The Cresta series is something that even hardcore shmuppers mostly had to google, starting with the ancient moon cresta in frickin 1980. But there's a very cute degree of reverance the game has for the series that even as an outsider is nice. Between it's cameos, the dramatic mode, some legitimately amusing fakeouts with bosses, it's generally very pleasant. The neo-nostalgia here is dealt with very well, and im sure the 4 ride or die Cresta fans are ecstatic right now.

That extends to the Dramatic mode, which, ignoring the insane decision to be $10 dlc, is quite good. Its a very kitsch 80s tropey anime sort of thing in terms of story, but works as a bizzarely good way of giving context to the events of the arcade mode without any baggage. You play the dramatic mode once and then you know, pretty much. It's asinine that it's not in the base product though.

In terms of real issues, it's mostly technical. The game looks bad - it's made in unity with 3d models and some bizzare shader applied to try and make it look like 2d renders or sprite work interchangably. Ew. It's also absurdly buggy. In my time playing alone i've encounters bugs where you cant move, visual effects breaking - and other players have already found consistent invincibility glitches, softlocks, crashes, you name it. On a gameplay level, the deepest flaw is probably that it's a game with probably quite low a skill ceiling. The docking system is good, but clearly doesnt have the depth of plat's best action games and it probably leans a bit too hard on the stage memorisation side of things, which will probably mean this will never be anyone's "main" shmup. It just doesn't seem like the sort of game those superplayers will put literal days into runs for.

Before i forget, Special mention has to go to Yuzo Koshiro's soundtrack. It's both great in it's original pieces (Saturn, Mercury and Sol's themes are fantastic) but also in taking motifs from the original games, most notably the original Terra Cresta theme. I'm not good at music criticism so i'll just say, yeah - it's good.

Ultimately, I like the game. A fair bit actually - but I have to admit that trying to earnestly reccomend it at time of writing comes with too many asterixes for me to bother, which i hope i've gotten through in these thoughts. It's also a shmup, and shmups often need a while to be out there for an actually good take to emerge, so take this whole day 2 ramble with a good pinch of salt.

But despite everything, I like it. It's platinum's best game since Automata, and it's a good, unique shooter. I'm happy with that.

Fuck it - I was in the middle of a Sopranos rewatch anyway and it's only 3 hours long, so why the hell not? Purports to be set in the middle of Season 5, though there isn't much to suggest that beyond a surprisingly well-rendered and well-acted Satriale gang showing up every once in a while to do a catchphrase for your amusement. A testament to the professional calibre of guys like Gandolifini and Imperioli that they actually read some of this "PRESS THE SQUARE BUTTON TO GRAB" shit at the same level as the gold David Chase and Matthew Weiner were weaving for them on the TV programme.

Unfortunately, there's no direct references to the ongoing storylines that were on television at the time, but that's maybe for the best given that Season 5 was mostly dealing with PlayStation 2-unfriendly topics like the impossibility of dissolving a marriage, the effects and ennui of Alzheimer's disease and the fundamentally immutable nature of human beings. It's very amusing to imagine Tony coming back to the Bing after one of this season's countless heart-wrenching conversations with his Uncle Jun or Carmela to dispense a [COLLECT 5 PASTRAMI SANDWICHES] fetchquest for our player-character.

Feels downright surreal at times to be playing a punch-punch-kick beat 'em up based on one of television's most legitimately prestigious works of art, and is worth playing for that reason alone; honestly, this isn't that far off, I dunno, "THE WIRE KART" or "MAD MEN: A TELLTALE SERIES". For my sins, I'm also playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds at the moment and even a campy little show like that feels tightly constricted by the chains of videogamedom. If nothing else, it was nice to walk around the Bing and other locations from the show and see all the sets connected together into a cohesive collection of liminal spaces I know. Just wish there was an Alabama 3 driving mission.

One night while I'm in the shower, the door gets knocked and I hear my dad shout "WHAT WAS THAT SHOOTING GAME I SAW ON THE TELLY?". After some confusing and loud back and forth, I realise it's this and tell him. "THANK YOU" is all I hear. The next day the game arrives. He'd immediately went on Amazon and got it for himself.

"Can you set up the virtual reality?"

I oblige, and he commandeers my chair, TV, and console for three solid hours. I spent a wee part of this time lying on the bed browsing my phone, listening to the game and looking up whenever he was getting particularly heated. He was having an absolute blast, and eventually I was enjoying just watching him experience this thing. You might say he was truly "In a world".

He so quickly went from weird arm flailing to precision reloads and headshots with shite one-liners. I watched my almost 60 year old dad become a real SAS dude. Childlike wonder from him experiencing full immersion, accompanied by patter like "Through his fuckin' eye" and "Go to sleep forever". At one point he was hanging from a window ledge 100 feet up on a building site, he drops one hand to his pistol, shoots a dude through the opening, leans in and grabs the fella's vape, takes a puff, chucks it and keeps climbing.

I barely remember what the game was about, but the live show I got to enjoy over three nights was incredible.

the xeno series has always struck a precarious balance between it's twin influences: contemporary anime tropes, and heady paperback golden-age science fiction. xeno has always been an incredibly derivative series that - when it is good - makes up for it's complete lack of originality with it's overwhelming enthusiasm for it's influences, and I think part of my continuing disappointment with The Direction xenoblade went after X was that it stopped pulling from 2010: The Year We Make Contact with the same fervor with which it pulled from Mobile Fighter G Gundam and instead went all in on aping the sensibilities and attitudes of repulsive but incredibly successful anime like Sword Art Online and Fate: Grand Order.

Xenoblade Chronicles X then, makes one last desperate stand for the paperback sci-fi side of the equation, leaning far harder into that side of the pendulum on every level of it's design and narrative intentions than any other game in the series. The common problem running through all three currently existing Xenoblade games - besides their choice of outfits for the girls, I mean - is that they are very bad at teaching the player how to play them, and I think X might be the most egregious example. It's this, more than any other element of the game, that I think kept people from accessing what is - for my money - the most narratively and mechanically accomplished game in the entire series.

Because, like I said, XCX isn't an anime. The main plot is leisurely and slight, not much happens except at the very end, and is mostly a vehicle for allowing the player to access the real narrative meat of the game - the myriad side quests that explore the game's sci-fi ideas, the world of Mira, and it's eclectic inhabitants. If that structure sounds familiar, it's probably because you've read a few of the golden-age sci-fi novels that director Tetsuya Takahashi is clearly so fond of. Looking at the audience the series has today, and even the one built up by the original game (or LPs of said game, XC1 standing alongside Earthbound and Persona 5 as JRPGs that developed a huge fandom through the lens of one or two big streamers/youtubers rather than solely the game itself) I don't think it's unreasonable to make the claim that many fans who derided XCX for "not having a story" didn't exactly have the framework to engage with this approach, and it's a shame the game didn't do enough to ease them into it.

In terms of writing, X is the best Xenoblade game. I don't even think it's close. It's certainly the most thematically ambitious, with the weirdest, thorniest ideas, and least reliant on characters constructed wholesale from clichés. I like quite a few characters in Xenoblade 1, but do I find any of them interesting? Not really. They're broadly-drawn cartoon people, and they work in that context, but XCX has characters that I thought quite deeply about, characters whose inner lives were compelling to me. it's themes are unique and compelling, exploring what "humanity" as a concept could mean divorced from our past lives, our home planet, and even our very bodies. The Mimeosome is the entire Xenoseries' best idea, a frighteningly rich concept that pairs beautifully with the questions mecha so often raises about the relationship between the self, the body, and the society in which it inhabits. But almost all of this is in the side-quests and heart-to-hearts, or doled out in piecemeal over an absurdly long game, and I can't exactly blame people for not getting to that stuff. XCX makes it difficult to access the parts of itself that are truly remarkable, and that's such a shame.

The combat system is the same: it has truly cavernous depth and options and customization, but by the end of my original over 150 Hour-long playthrough, I felt like I had only just got a handle on the tangled web of systems and mechanics and stats. It doesn't so much as throw you into the deep end but throw you into the mariana trench. But once you do crack it? Once you have an armory of Skells tooled out with well-thought out builds, each named and given color-schemes after your favorite mechs? It feels incredible. XCX is a majestic mechanical mountain to climb, and while the view from the top is incredible, I could have done with a few ski-lifts on the way up here.

I completely understand why people dislike this game, why it was almost uniformly seen as a steep downgrade from it's predecessor, and why, with a sense of palpable resignation, the influence pendulum was swung completely back to Full Anime for future instalments. But I can't help but love this game. It's ideas are so genuinely thought-provoking that, half a decade after I wrapped up my playthrough, I still find myself turning it over in my head, thinking about what it tried to say and what it tried to do. The post-credits scene is maybe my favorite one in any video game or film, and completely set my mind on fire with it's implications both for a phantom Xenoblade Chronicles Double X and the adventure that just lay behind me. It's a deeply flawed game, one that could be improved immensely, but it will always have my heart, over it's more straightforwardly numbered siblings. It represents best the wild, wrongheaded, idiotic ambition that defines why I still, on some level, care about Xenogames, even if I think they have about a 50/50 track record at this point of Good to Total Shit, even if they will never, ever be normal about women, because I can't help but look at X and think "shine on, you crazy motherfucker".

I love it. I love being a BLADE!

Oh and the soundtrack rips so fucking hard you have no idea. Easily the best of the three, as long as you aren't someone who's phone is full of "EPIC ANIME BATTLE MUSIC" mp3s!! All those who think the NLA themes are bad are weak and will not survive the winter

Ah

I really needed that.

Hard to be cynical, hard to analyze what I needed emotionally in the moment. Something to plug a hole I didn't realize was bothering me. Sometimes the verisimilitude of a hike that I can't currently get right now is the best medicine for my mental state. The lighthearted soul of something really warm, uplifting that makes my heart soar. I cried to very small, very clearly crafted, earnest messages. I wandered, I explored, I went to the ends of the island and back, and I got something to remember this day forever.

Thank you for the gentle reminder to look forward head high.

Suggested by Phantom. Thank you

Pokemon Legends: Arceus isn't perfect by any means, but it is the first Game Freak-developed Pokemon game in a long time that actually feels ambitious, and it largely accomplishes what it sets out to do - the reinvention of Pokemon as a series.

Pokemon can always rely on a strong core gameplay loop, and even though Arceus changes this in many ways, it remains compelling. It manages to make catching what are mostly the same old Pokemon fun and fresh again, the world feels dangerous and challenging, and stumbling upon new or rarer Pokemon as you explore the world is a delight.

The game relies heavily on this core gameplay loop, but it is so good that I can forgive its failings in other areas. The artstyle does a lot of heavy lifting to compensate for the game's technical shortcomings, and the game can look as beautiful as it can ugly. Overall I didn't find it distracting, and the performance was generally fine in handheld mode.

The main story is not particularly good and the pacing is poor with a hectic and rushed climax to the main story (although it is at least coherent, unlike Sword and Shield), but surprisingly I found the world-building and sidestories to be a lot more interesting.

Most Pokemon games show a world in which Pokemon, whether by battling, companionship or utility, are a fully-integrated part of modern life. Arceus gives us a past in which this isn't the case. People are terrified of Pokemon, and you see them slowly warm up to the idea of partnering with them as you blaze a trail through Hisui. It's not revolutionary storytelling or anything, but it is cool to help people learn more about Pokemon and also if you didn't pick Beaugene what are you even doing?

I'm neutral on the changes to the battle system. I always thought the classic system was one of the strengths of the main games and don't really want to see it replaced by the turn order system used here, but there are definitely things the classic games should take - like the more visceral and dynamic presentation of the battles and the removal of IVs and EVs for a much more player-friendly system of levelling stats with items - they could always cap the total stat levels you can get in classic games to maintain the 'build' system of EVs.

I had a few other minor issues. Gating the final challenge behind the full dex is fine, but when one Pokemon is gated behind the completion of a mundane 'find all the collectibles scattered across the world' sidequest, that's annoying. Loads of open world games have these and I hate them. I always appreciate the approach Breath of the World took with the Korok Seeds mocking this kind of completionism, so not a fan that it is essentially required here.

A late-game set of Legendaries also have some of the most irritating encounters in the game. Once you get into battle with them, it's fine, but getting into battle is the hard part. Running away, spamming difficult to predict attacks, a barrier that is annoying to break so you can actually send a Pokemon in to fight them? It's like Game Freak wanted to get on every single nerve I have, and it kinda dragged the late-game experience down a bit for me.

But overall, Arceus is a triumph. It feels like a new Gen 1 for Pokemon (although, ironically, the Gen 1 pandering is much less of a thing here). Like Gen 1, it has captured lightning in a bottle despite being somewhat rough and raw. The potential of its format lies yet unrealised, but it's an incredibly solid base to build a new future for the series off of, and I truly hope that Game Freak do not ignore this game's successes in future titles.