♪ When Peppino runs and cries,
And you're never out of tries,
That's amore~ ♪

This game is incredible. Straight from the oven of a person who thought "What if I made my own Wario Land 4 and made it just as insane?" If you're familiar at all with Wario Land 4, you'll immediately be able to draw comparisons, from the abstract level design and art style to the insanely well made soundtrack.

You play as Peppino, a pizza shop owner who must now climb the titular Pizza Tower so that Pizza Face, an evil Pizza, doesn't blow Peppino's pizza shop to smithereens. If the word "pizza" doesn't start sounding strange to you now, give it some time, I'm not done using it yet.

The gameplay loop for Pizza Tower is simple; go through stages in each zone, collect enough cash in each zone to unlock the boss door, fight the area boss, repeat. The real sauce of this game is how each stage has you frantically searching for ingredients that net you a total amount of cash on level completion. Peppino's moveset is oozing with flavor, having a sprint, bash, wall climb, ground pound, dive, and even a Metroid shine spark because, yes, every 2D game needs a Metroid shine spark. This doesn't even count some stages that have gimmick abilities like spicy breath, rockets you can fly on, bubbles, and so much more. These stage specific abilities help in giving each stage their own identity among the various zones, with some abilities being as absurd as a flying chicken companion based on an old 3D PS1 platformer, to an entirely contained mini golf course.

Peppino can't die from normal damage in regular stages, instead only losing points that go towards your total score at the end of any given stage. Your incentive to not get hit all comes from how well you want to be scored, the lowest rank being an undercooked D, and the highest being a well baked P. This way the game can draw in both types of motivated players; ones who want to improve on every playthrough and those who just want to play the game as is.

No matter what type of player you are, you'll probably end up blasting through each stage at breakneck speeds. Stages are built with this high speed of play in mind, including ramps to maintain your momentum and enemies being helpless to your fastest sprint speed. The speed you move at is key because, once you make it to the end of every stage, the game has you run all the way back through it to the entrance before the timer ticks down. At this point in the stage, new paths are opened that were originally walled off, incentivizing those who feel so bold to now explore more of the level before Pizza Face wakes up and kills the player for real.

So that's gameplay. And it's great, but the real special sauce to this pizza is the presentation. Pizza Tower is one of the most manic looking episodes of a game I've ever seen. So much time and love was put into every animation present throughout the entire game. Peppino has a wide range of expressions, from his timid idle animation to his deranged full sprint speed. The humor and expressiveness in this game feels like it's inspired from older cartoons like Ren & Stimpy or Rocko's Modern Life, with the anatomy of Peppino, his allies, and enemies all incredibly exaggerated for comedic affect, even down to the audio.

The music captures that Wario Land 4 feeling almost perfectly. There aren't as many slower tracks through out Pizza Tower, but the ones that go hard and fast are incredible. Many of the samples used throughout are the same used through out much of Wario Land 4, and the core theme, "It's Pizza Time", always delivers that rush of adrenaline when sprinting back to the entrance of a stage before time is up. I really can't praise the music enough. All stage themes fit their aesthetic perfectly, always lending to create that extra feeling that every stage was crafted with every key detail in mind.

Pizza Tower truly is a supreme example of the type of game that can be crafted through the inspiration of another. Since it's time, Wario Land 4 hasn't really been topped in how it shook up the 2D platforming genre. And while Pizza Tower takes much of the way Wario Land 4 is structured, it never stops being it's own game that derives a similar yet separate enjoyment all together. I'm so glad the developers could deliver such a flavorful deep dish of a game. This is one mom and pop's that I'll be coming back to several more times, even after finishing my first slice. Highly recommended!

Did you know that it is against the law to say anything bad about Bloodborne? It's true. If you ever even think about how it would've been better as an action game rather than trying to be like a Souls game, you'll see police officers outside your house. They'll say you have the right to remain silent and that anything you say can and will be used against you. But that doesn't scare you. You shriek as they drag you away about how it's not fun making a build for a weapon you only get after beating the final boss. As you're waiting in your cell, your provided attorney will try and work out a plea bargain, claiming that at the very least you did play the game for 300+ hours on your PlayStation 4, way more than the weekly amount that all PlayStation 4 owners are required by law to play. While on trial however, you lash out. You say that it's not fair that Bloodborne can't even be ported over to PC, and that not getting an FPS boost for PlayStation 5 is even more outrageous. The judge bangs his gavel. You've dug your grave. You find yourself some years later, serving a life sentence because you couldn't play ball and just have fun with your hyper Lovecraftian atmospheric action adventure game. Guards walk by your cell and wince, and your fellow prisoners whisper nothing good about you. They're intimidated by you. And not because you were so brave to say that Bloodborne has flaws. But because of the same repeated phrase you have carved all over your cell. A phrase that only says... “cummmfpk”.

I've always been a big fan of the Wario Land series from afar, peaking with one of the most fascinating 2D platformers ever made, Wario Land 4. Seeing Wario take on his own unique identity from Mario was always so fascinating to me. Rather than just having another run and jump man, Wario has always felt like you could do anything with him that isn't that and it would make sense, no matter how absurd.

WarioWare, Inc. is just that; expanding on what the identity of Wario games are and even establishing an entirely distinct cast from the Mushroom Kingdom crew that we're used to today. And rather than being a platformer this time around, we get to play a large array of microgames that Wario has cooked up in another attempt to get filthy rich, poking fun at the hype drummed up for video games at the time.

Now nothing about these microgames really stands out on their own. Individually, they're very simplistic and have easy clear conditions. The greatness of this game comes from the format of each stage, always introducing several new microgames that are all thrown at you to complete in quick succession. Your ability process a quick verb prompt and then respond to a brand new screen with a microgame is what's really tested here; awareness and reaction time is key. In a short amount of time, you'll see so many varying microgames, all with their own absurdist visual styles, which then caps out every stage with a slightly longer boss stage. Ultimately, this creates a game that is truly greater than the sum of it's parts.

I should also mention that I love the extended cast that they've created here. Each one has their own unique personality that, while Wario isn't really around them, you can see how each of them can inhabit a world with a money hungry lunatic like Wario. Whether it be Mona outrunning the police to get to her job at the gelato shop, Kat and Ana saving you, the player (who is a shogun), from a malicious yokai, or Dr. Crygor trying not to shit his pants, I loved all these scenarios and how they fleshed out this new cast, and I look forward to seeing the extended cast in later entries.

I also want to give a big shout out to the composer, Ryoji Yoshitomi. His style is immediately identifiable if you're familiar with the soundtrack of Wario Land 4, using a mix of good and varied vocal samples and audio warbles that gave Wario Land 4 such a strong audio identity and taking full advantage of the Game Boy Advance. There's so much that goes into the soundtracks for both of these games that a person like me can really dig into, but I'll keep it brief here.

I just freaking loved this game. Once I picked it up, I barely wanted to put it down. And the modes you get to play later that let you test the boss stages at their hardest difficulty or just seeing how far you can get in an endless series of microgames is a treat. I'm glad they kept this series for as long as they did, and it looks like there's still some love for it at Nintendo at the time that I'm writing this. I hope to play the later games some time in the future and hope they can deliver a similar feeling I got from this one. Highly recommended!

I originally played Metroid Prime for the GameCube when I was much younger. I never finished it, and remember only making it as far as Phendrana Drifts before I became too frustrated at not knowing where to go, where I then proceeded to put the game down and never pick it back up. Today I have finished Metroid Prime Remastered to make up for my impatience in my youth, and I come away from it thinking, "Yeah, I'd say dropping it over that was pretty justified."

I'd wager most of the appeal for Metroid Prime comes from the feeling you get of being a space adventurer on an unknown planet. After all, Samus Aran is a fantastic character to play as in Metroid and most games don't feel quite as alien in it's aesthetic in quite the same way as Metroid. In Metroid Prime, you're never pointed to go in any direction, only ever trusting your map, data logs, and memory for points of interest along your journey. The game definitely had that affect on me for most of the game, though putting the game down for any long amount of time would result in me needing to spend several minutes going back over the map screen and remembering those points of interests. Like the 2D games, you're given a good amount of freedom to look around an area even with your limited abilities at the beginning of the game, always keeping note to come back through later when you might have a new ability that opens up more of the area.
That's more or less the gameplay loop for Metroid Prime; comb through zones to find new abilities until you finally have all of your arsenal to beat the game (wow it's like a Metroid game or something). The only real issue I take with the gameplay loop in this game is, most of the time, you can never judge if a new location you can access is progress towards a new ability or a dead end. The game has a strange way of giving you an incredibly valuable ability in one room, showing you a door that ability can now open, only for you to hit a dead end immediately upon exploring it. Now is there anything so wrong about finding more rooms that require more abilities to unlock? No, especially in a series that relishes in making the player backtrack as frequently as Metroid does. I guess I just found myself becoming annoyed whenever I found myself creating more mental checkmarks of zones in the future rather than being able to knock out a good chunk of an area when getting a new ability.

Combat is... fine... until it's not. Enemies early on are very simple; you shoot small enemies with your laser beam and big enemies get the missiles. It does the job and can be pretty fun at times, even if most harder enemies before the middle of the game start having weak points only on their back. Later on, you also start to unlock different beam weapons, each one serving a separate use and unique interactions with puzzles and enemies. But where the combat goes from being fine to not fine is once they start introducing enemies that can only be damaged by specific weapon types.
This starts out harmless enough with enemies that are more like stage hazards requiring a specific laser beam weapon to destroy them. But this problem caps once you hit an area where suddenly most enemies in the zone are now color coded, requiring the weapon type that their color matches with to deal any damage. What's worse is these enemies aren't even unique from one another, they all still have the same basic "run around, shoot you at a distance, melee if you get close" move set, no matter which color they are. I can see what they might've been going for, having enemies act as a sort of light puzzle to solve in each room, but this made me end up opting out of combat entirely when needing to backtrack through those rooms later on.
I'll be keeping this review spoiler free as usual (unless revealing gameplay elements like this is a spoiler, in which case, my bad), but just know that I hated this inclusion in the game and it never gets any better from that point onwards; if anything it gets worse.

Overall I'd say that, for most things I enjoyed in this game, it always came with their own frustrations. I love the moment in a Metroid game where you finally have your full arsenal of weapons and moves, but I can't say I enjoyed the frustration of constantly hitting dead ends before getting to that point in this one. Combat in 3D compared to the 2D games still feels like what you'd expect, but falls on it's face later on in a poor attempt at trying to mix things up for the end game. I'd say the positives mostly outweigh the negatives and at least the problem of not knowing where dead ends are is a feeling I wouldn't have again on another replay. I consider myself a fairly big Metroid fan and I'd slept on this game for quite some time, always hearing that it was a beloved classic and a great example of transitioning a style of play from 2D to 3D. I'd say I'd agree with that sentiment, though a part of me does think the game lives in such a positive space because it's well beloved for it's sci-fi aesthetic and impressive graphical fidelity for the time. Everyone likes to remember their favorite childhood game being just as good as they remembered. But Metroid Prime is definitely a game where you have to eventually take off your red rose tinted glasses at times; that enemy you're looking at is purple, after all.

Not a terrible lot to say about this game. Surprisingly solid game for a genre that wasn't fully represented for the time it came out in. The running and jumping feel good, I never got tired of running on walls and jumping off them to get to other ledges. Climbing pipes is kinda lame became it slows you down so much, so less of those would've been nice in more of the inside levels.
Combat's not great. I opted to not ever fire a gun at enemies and, while it added a bit more challenge, I found punching and parrying enemies pretty unsatisfying. I get the feeling gun combat is probably looked down upon, but you're really not missing out if you just want to blast through the mandatory fight sequences. And if those sequences aren't mandatory and you can totally run past all of them, please forgive me for being bad.
One thing I did really appreciate was how minimal the UI was for the entire game. No health bar, no objective markers, and just a tiny reticle that you can even toggle in the options. For a game about getting from point A to point B while weaving around jump puzzles in first person, it's surprising to see it not have obnoxious "go here" markers or a type of Crazy Taxi arrow pointing where to go. I know they mark much of the interactables with bright red, but I like the excuse that it's the runner's intuition and it matches the aesthetic pretty well. The game's use of a color is pretty damn good, and the game still looks pretty good visually as well.
Wow, I had more to say than I thought. Overall a pretty fun game, if not just a little half baked feeling in some departments. It's not terribly long either, for better or for worse. You can definitely beat it in an afternoon if you felt so inclined. Would recommend!

It's difficult to put into words the ringer this game put me through. If Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is a game that you can play 100 times and learn something you didn't know the last time with each playthrough, Spelunky 2 is a game where you can die 100 times in completely different ways and then learn nothing.

The magic to most of those deaths is that, most of the time, you'll realize it was entirely your own fault.

Died to a long drop? Check how far down it is next time.
Dart trap? Just use your eyeballs, nerd.
An elevator going up and down that you were just a tiny bit too close to one side and got crushed when passing by a wall? Yup, that's also your fault.

This game gets 5/5 stars because I loved bashing my head into this wall. It's a very hard game to put down once you've gotten far enough in. And having multiple paths that lead to a few different zones and endings made my drive even stronger. I still play this game on occasion just because getting in a run just fills time so efficiently. I love this game, and it easily makes it's way into my top 5 of all time.

Katamari Damacy is my new happy time game. Whenever I've had a bad day at work, I can always look forward to rolling into my bed and then rolling up a bunch of objects into a giant ball that I can shoot into space.

In a way, rolling up the katamari is the perfect stress reliver if you're not bothered by the nonconventional control scheme for moving it in the game. The Prince and, by extension, the player really have no concerns for anything that they're rolling up. And yet the game is much less violent of a way for you to virtually vent your frustration than mowing down pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto or throwing around cars in The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.

I can derive satisfaction in the giant katamari I've created for The King of All Cosmos, who always appreciates my work more than my boss at my job can really ever express.

I also just want to add that I love how The Prince waves you goodbye when you turn the game off. Little gestures of kindness like that after a long day at your job that you hate can really keep a person going, and more games should be so delightful as this one.

It feels like it's really rare when a survival horror game really just nails everything. This game has just about everything I look for to hook me.
The pacing is phenomenal. I found myself saying that this was the last puzzle I do before stopping, then getting excited for what I got from the puzzle, only to power through for another two hours.
The anxious feeling of not knowing if enemies you downed in a room will get back up or not, or if they're even worth the trouble. You're always making decisions based on your limited resources and inventory space, keeping the moment to moment gameplay challenging while rarely feeling repetitive (I didn't like the flashlight).
I became so engrossed with the puzzles that bled into other parts of the levels that I busted out an actual notepad to scrawl combinations, patterns, and diagrams that I knew I would need later.
The story and atmosphere are also great. Nothing ever feels entirely grounded in reality and gave me the same sort of unreliable narration you can never be sure about your first playthrough. It kept myself always wondering if anything I was doing in game was real or not.
Like I said in the beginning, I think this game was incredibly solid the entire way through. A shame I'm getting to it too late to rate for my games I played in 2022, but it's definitely getting the recognition it deserves from me this year.
High recommended.

Awful. Could barely make it past the first level before I gave up. Forget the humor, if you find it funny, that's fine, I'm glad you can enjoy at least that aspect.
The game feels so bad to play. Even while sprinting, jumping, or air-dashing, you feel so sluggish. Every encounter is the same boring shooting at enemies that just path themselves back and forth. The art style is also just so ugly. Even worse was noticing posters made with AI art.
There's just absolutely nothing to like about this game. I'm shocked even more that it released at a full $60 price tag. I couldn't imagine justifying completing this game. Utter trite.

It's really hard to write this review because I didn't go into Bayonetta 3 with any ill intent. Hell, I bothered to actually buy the game after watching some gameplay and thinking it actually looked pretty fun. I never really go out of my way to play video games that I expect to have a bad time with. Otherwise, I'd feel like I just wasted my time.

That all said, Bayonetta 3 feels like such an absolute let down of a game in a series that I really like.

If you check my profile, I actually replayed both Bayonetta 1 and 2 in preparation to finally sit down with this one. In my replays, I found that there's a lot about both those games I really appreciate. The combat, the characters, the sloppy yet still somehow endearing story. All coming from a studio that I believe genuinely wanted to make a good character action game to follow in the footsteps of legends.

Bayonetta 3 does not feel like any of that. The characters I love are either not like themselves at all or almost completely absent. The combat feels off, hits not having that same chunky impact from previous games, and the camera never quite positioning itself right, along with huge enemies dithering to make up for the less than optimal hardware.

The story feels directionless. Bayonetta has to gather macguffins while Jeanne and Viola both chase down characters for reasons that are barely ever stated why. I won't even speak on the ending to keep this review spoiler free. But just wow, didn't see that one coming (you actually see it coming from miles away).

I did have some fun with the summon system. It did feel a little half baked in some places, and it's obviously much slower than either of the original games combat, but there's some fun sprinkled in there. The pace at which you unlock new weapons and summons is nice, however they do rob you of trying out your new toys by throwing you into another character side mission right after acquiring them.

So that's about all I have to say. Really just not impressed with where the game decided to go in just about every aspect that I can even appreciate a video game. Can't say I'm looking forward to the next one. Wouldn't recommend.

This feels like a waste of potential. For context, I lean much more towards remakes being something that stands on it's own from the original. This is the exact same experience from Demon's Souls on PS3 with a worse coat of paint and faster load times.

I don't want to discredit Bluepoint like they did a terrible job though, there was clearly a lot of effort put into the visuals and making it run smoothly on PS5. But I honestly feel like that's kinda it. Like they were tasked to just make a pretty looking remake with not much else going into it. If that was the goal, they succeeded. But I don't think it's worth replacing the original over.

The new music also sucks.

Edit: Went back and beat it. Yeah I still feel about the same. The OG filter cuts out a bit of my complaints about the worse coat of paint and some of the GRAPHICS are actually pretty impressive. But it's still original Demon's Souls underneath all that with some QOL mixed in. Not the worst but still kind of a waste of potential that a remake for DeS could've been.

Music still sucks, too.