I am not a fighting game gal, but I watched EVO with some friends and it reminded me that I own this after finding it in a thrift store. My relationship to fighting games has always been that I wish so badly to be good at them, but I’ve never gotten the hang of a single game, lol. I played a decent amount of Street Fighter IV on Xbox 360, but never won a single online match. I say all this only to preface that this game feels good to me, someone who all fighting games feel wrong to. Hits feel good, the game works well, it never felt clunky at all! Also is pretty crazy that character sprites don’t look fucking disgusting, and the background twisting when you move up and down is pretty crazy. A great GBA tech demo, I guess, but I don’t figure it as some hidden gem.

My save file got fried...

I usually switch in between playing Game Boy games on my Game Boy Advance and my GB Operator, since my GBA isn't backlit, I like to play on PC. Though, sometimes, I found, playing the same cart on different hardware can make the GB Operator a little finicky. Almost lost a Pokémon save file, too, but the Operator hadn't overwritten the cart before I took it out to test if it was really wiped. So, I think I might just take a break from this, even though I was really picking up steam and played a clean two hours just today. I was really, really enjoying this game so much, and wanted to talk about it as a way to mourn.

I played a lot of Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker on the Nintendo DS. Though, eventually, I got bored of the story and just bred slimes together to get new ones (I love Dragon Quest slimes). When I started this game, I did plan to spend a decent amount of time getting the coolest fucking slime I could get my grubby hands on, I also did want to actually spend some time and really finish one of these games.

Dragon Warrior Monsters had been on my wishlist for a bit, especially after getting back into this series a lot earlier this year. I finally got my hands on a cheapish (sub $20 before shipping) copy from a Virginia state Goodwill's eBay account. When I started it up, I didn't really know what I was getting into, having completely forgotten the premise to 'DQM: Joker', I just got into it. This game is quirky, but, it's maybe one of the most succinct and well-fleshed-out creature collectors you could get pre-GBA.

I mean, let's not pull punches, this is Enix's answer to Pokémon's insane success, and they answered well. Enix was probably a better-funded game studio than Game Freak, even with the latter heading into its mega hit's sequels, and also probably a better experienced studio, as well. The result is a Game Boy Color launch title that absolutely blows even Pokémon Gold and Silver Versions out of the water.

Before 'Pokemon GSC' could even hit shelves, Dragon Warrior Monsters had released in Japan with a mechanic that is the reason I think this beats 'GSC' anyday: link cable breeding. The breeding mechanic in this game cannot be overpraised; it is well explained and is core to crafting a strong team of elite monsters. You breed monsters and they basically take on one parent's monster "pedigree," and then inherits both parents spell and ability trees. The result is you getting new monsters you can't find in the wild through breeding, with a toolkit that you can craft by breeding monsters with a good pool of spells. The game even keeps track of a monster's parents and their masters, so if you breed through multiplayer, you'll have a record of which friend you got your monster's mom or dad from!

This level of experimentation and mystery when it comes to monster breeding is just something that isn't even found in modern Pokémon games. When you breed Pokémon, you know exactly what you're getting and exactly what moves it will learn (even if you're aiming for an egg move). They never even made it so you might get either the mother species OR the father species. Breeding in Pokémon is basically just there for shiny hunting, these days, because there's not really any incentive to breed Pokémon during a playthrough! They even stopped making baby evolutions, and made existing baby evos available in the wild to even more invalidate this mechanic's existence within that franchise.

The satisfaction of breeding a Healslime with a weird flower bird that I'd never seen in a Dragon Quest game beforehand and getting a Wing Slime as a baby that had a buttload of support and healing spells that it could learn and also was a cute and cool ass slime species that I'd not seen before beats anything I could get from discovering new species of Pokémon.

It's a real shame this series got kind of kneecapped in the west by releasing a month and a half after Pokémon Gold and Silver Versions over here, but, gosh darn it, does it just make me so excited for the multiplayer potential of a new installment in this series getting released outside Japan for the first time in, like, ten years.

Wini the Wing Slime... I will come back for you... I will come back to this game and reclaim my save.

Just utter genius. So well plotted and designed to properly convey political anxieties and frustrations. Maybe one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played; so many times the past couple of days I found myself worrying about things that the dear border agent is stuck thinking about. The immersion is very tactical, too. No matter what your political leanings are in real life, you will find yourself feeling satisfied to catch a discrepancy and stamp a big red mark onto passports. A game about beauracracy where the routine actions of scanning documents meet the firing synapses of call-and-response interaction. Ugh.

The fact that your family are just circles of their status; you only know as how much trouble they’re to cause you, how much money they’ll cost. On my first run, I found myself constantly having to sacrifice heat or food because of my beginner performance, and on my second run I found myself not having to worry about money at all up until the end.

Beaucracy is inherently discompassionate, anti-thetical to human connection and relation. Documentation as absolute truth, under rule that is absolute, it only begets a shedding of everything that makes you human. You are only the sum of your government approvals; under authoritarian capitalism, the government gives you existence, and labor gives you purpose. The way to gain back your humanity is to be humane. Chances to be compassionate, to be empathetic, even when it’s not allowed. Even when it might cost you.

Ten years ago, this game was mine and my friends’ Minecraft. We would play for hours and hours, and out of every game I own on Steam, ten years on, this game was the one with the most hours logged at 114 (low to many others, I’m sure, but a lot for me). I finally had an urge to go back and play this game, and when I did, I found myself intensely addicted. There is something to the exploration loop of this game that really tickles my ape brain to the point where, out of all of the games I’ve grown to love, this one has eaten up the longest play sessions. The way the caves are designed to be half-naturally forming allows for you to easily discover a path underground as you dig. With a small-sized world, too, a single player will find lots and lots to discover. For better or for worse.

I definitely appreciate this game’s exploration loop a lot more than its combat/campaign progression loop. It is so satisfying to be digging and discover another natural clearing in the map that leads you to different biomes, watching your map fill with the different colors of the different areas. There’s just something off about how one obtains better materials, etc. and how not-inuitive-at-all it is to craft things outside of the normal building/equipment that one might need during everyday gameplay. At first it’s simple but as soon as you see all of what you can craft you realize you’re dealing with a game with nearly 15 years of extra content inside of it. Once I found the first chest with a bunch of potions and bombs I realized how quickly this game can make you feel in over your head. Then I summoned the last boss on accident as I was exploring the lower depths of the world and that just made me feel a little intimidated. That was, until, after defeating only a few more bosses, I found myself in posession of items that made me feel incredibly powerful.

I guess something I didn’t remember from my youthful days of playing this is that the world of Terraria is incredibly hostile. While I didn’t have a lot of fun tracking down boss fights, there are enough surprises within the caverns of the depths of this world that even if you completely ignored every boss battle, you will still accrue a large collection of ways to die. Something I thought about a lot while playing this game is the fine line between a game that offers a difficult and sometimes-frustrating, but rewarding and sincere challenge, and a game that has at least the slightest disdain for its player base. Does a game you’re playing ever feel like it’s laughing at you? Does that make you have less fun?

Terraria is definitely having a chuckle to itself, especially when you activate the billionth boulder trap and find yourself hiking back meters and meters to wherever you lost all that coin. There is something to say about creating new scenarios and adjusting the entire game around the power creep caused, naturally, by years worth of new additions. I found myself constantly cycling through different weapon options throughout the game. Magical staves, muskets, maces, lances, lasers, yo-yos, bee shooters. That doesn’t even scratch the surface of all of the different accessories and equipment that you’ll cycle through, as you explore different biomes each with their own hazards and own personal hells.

I do have to wonder if the overall design of this game is a failure since the driving force of my play was revealing as much of the map as possible until it looked full enough that I was satisfied, and once I had I found myself a little tired of it all. Just for now, though, I do kind of find myself curious in playing an older version of this game on an older console without the latest updates. Though, for now, I definitely need to cut out this timesink from my life so I can focus on better things.

Since I find myself jumping so far forward in this series after my last stint in Harvest Moon, I'm going to try my best not to compare this to my experience with 'Back to Nature', and try and just see at as its own game. Which would be hard both ways, because this oddly feels like a culmination of a lot of great DS games. Animal Crossing: Wild World had seemed to placed its loving touch on this game, and I also got hints of the Dragon Quests and Zeldas of this era, too, but it might just be that the DS had such a more realized aesthetic than we give it credit for. This has the same mix of 3D models and sprite work that has made me tingle in all of my favorite games on this handheld, so this installment was at least easy on the eyes. Or, maybe these influences are more circular than I think because I haven't seen every step in this series. But, of course, most of these cutesy simulation games and RPGs have their overlapping sensibilities.

I heard about 'Grand Bazaar' while browsing the different installments of this series, most of which I haven't even seen screenshots of, and found this one's premise to be pretty nice. The whole gimme that you are part of a farmer's market and have to sell what you produce at a weekly event instead of just shipping your goods straight from your farm is a nice little twist. It offers a really interesting twist on the gameplay loop shifting from being daily to being weekly, and at the peaks of this game I found myself closing up shop and thinking, "Let me just play through the next bazaar day..." It also entices players to get into other ventures. Don't just grow produce for that season, go fishing, or make tea, and cook dishes. You can sell all of these things at your farmstand and the more you put into it, the more money you'll make.

There's this really cute gimmick where you there are three windmills in the town that all make a different range of items. You unlock them in a staggered pace so you're not overwhelmed with the plethora of possibilities. It is really funny, though, to look at the recipe list the game gives you and see the daunting scope of just how much you can produce in this game. Progression feels slow and fast at the same time and I always felt like I was doing something wrong. Especially when I spend a lot of my money on seeds and animals and then when the game asks me for 30,000 dollars to upgrade any of my meager fields or storages, I really feel like I'm missing something.

The gameplay loop did start to wear off, then, even before I'd finished my first year. I just wasn't vibing with the whole thing as much as I was with 'Back to Nature', and it most definitely didn't help that the town feels so much less lively, as well. I did not really mesh with any of the characters and there's not a whole lot to explore, at all. It feels very empty, and the townsfolk that are supposed to be suitors or friends feel either hollow or like copies of characters from other games. Definitely needed to borrow from Animal Crossing when spicing up the townsfolks' dialog. Which stinks because the big kicker for these games is getting married and getting to know these people!

The last thing I'll say is one of the biggest punches this game throws right off the bat is that YOUR CHARACTER CAN DOUBLE JUMP!!! for some reason! It's an insanely fun way to navigate the town, lol, and all I could think about was how this might be used to speed run this game...

Sometimes it’s hard to grade a remake. See, the thing with Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town is that Harvest Moon is so fucking good. It feels so good to see the money coming in; to sheer a sheep, to collect an egg from a coop, to brush a horse, to harvest crops. Seeing a grey heart turn to purple gives me more serotonin response than most entire games do. It is really impressive to create a gameplay loop full of monotonous tasks that build to a big enough prize to keep me going and going and going. Because of that, it is undeniable: I think Harvest Moon is fucking good. However, Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town kind of stinks.

Now, when judging a remake it’s kind of hard, so let me set some parameters: okay, there’s really, mainly, only one. Has the team behind the remake made the quintessential way to play this game? With a remake, especially one that keeps so true to the gameplay of its origin as much as this game has, you can really only judge on presentation and added content. Now, I can't talk of all the additions to this title except for gay marriage, which legitimately accounts for an entire star of my rating. Mainly so because I honestly can see myself going to past Harvest Moon titles that have romancing only to disinterested in the romance portion of the game because there's no lesbians!

Okay, now presentation. While gay marriage accounts for an entire star being added to the rating, this game's presentation accounts for the missing two stars. The worst thing you can do is make an ugly Harvest Moon game, and from what I’ve seen of Marvelous’ modern work, this installment is far from its worst, but this art style isn’t doing the job for me. It’s that kind of smoothed-over 3D art that just squeezes all the charm out of designs that maybe would be cuter with less polygons, lol. I will say, though, the 2D watercolor-style portraits are really charming. Another big thing is sound design and response; something I can’t really put my finger on, but this is lacking a lot of polish, even disregarding plenty of small glitches that may or may not mostly revolve around navigating tight spaces while nearby an adult horse.

When I got a Playstation Vita, it was mainly in hopes to play, for cheap, all of the Playstation-exclusive JRPGs that had stayed away from Nintendo and Xbox. I played a lot of classics for the first time on that beautiful handheld that had such a thankless job. One of those classics was Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. I played a lot of it just willy-nilly, and the thing about this series is that it is not friendly to casual players (or teens with no sense of a series’ particular vibes). You better have a notebook, ready, motherfucker, and even with a walkthrough at the ready telling me what to give Ann everyday to get her to like me, I just did not have the discipline to live a successful farm life.

So, even though I thought this game, as a remake of one of the quintessential Harvest Moon titles, was just average, it still was such a joy to be able to tackle this as an adult and really develop the fuck out of an anime farm. I was racking up the coin, raising animals that loved me back, and I got freaking gay married, whores!!! It wouldn’t be the first time I sunk a bunch of hours (I had one day where I did 10 hours straight) into a fun game with rough presentation (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), but I wanted to clear this from my backlog, since I’ve had this for nearly two years lol, before getting into older installments that I hear good things about on here. I went through two full years in this game, and I definitely am excited to get into this series a lot more and see what's out there in its past installments after playing this one.

F-Zero is so cool. I tried GP Legend a while back and just didn’t have the discipline or patience to get used to the controls, which require a lot more conscious input than I expected a fantasy racing game to have. Adds a lot of depth that caught me off-guard. Even the different ‘machines’ actually feel so different. You don’t notice that shit in Mario Kart. Maybe a competitve player does, but in F-Zero each machine feels different and also can be picked based off of a player’s style and expertise.

F-Zero is so cool! The environments in this game are so awesome; there’s a simplicity to this world that really works in its favor. You aren’t just racing cars on a track, you are racing space machines on space courses on different planets with cool names like “Empyrean Colony” and “Ancient Mesa.” There’s not a lot of lore given in-game, there’s not even any characters shown that go with each machine, but what the setting gives is a pretty coat for to make this cool racer really stylized, and that gives a game a lot of character!

Unlockables are set up so you just naturally unlock them all as you play each and every mode and level in this game, as you improve and try harder difficulties. Such a satisfying racer. Great machine designs, great environment designs, great controls for such a simple hardware, just really so fun.

I really wanted to finish the last series on ‘Expert’ difficulty, but that second course has a lot of jumps, and your machine takes damage every jump, and I just can’t crack it, and I’d rather my play with this end on a less sour note than me trying to conquer what I think is the only unfair moment in this game.

So, I have this local game store a few towns that I love going to. They are a great little store because they have visuals up on their walls for every console in existence, with the console itself and the box it was released in up there almost like a tiny museum. It's very nice to walk around and feel like I'm in a Video Game Store. The problem is, like most retro media stores, they price the old media they get turned/traded in at whatever the average price is up on eBay, or what have you. This means if you go in looking for a GameCube game or a DS game that is priced a little unfairly, you're not going to have any luck in person, either. What you're better off doing is hoping you find an old gem, something from your childhood that isn't priced at $100 for just the disc because it only really means something to you.

This was my first Game Boy Advance game. Along with two original, purple Game Boy Advances, my brother and I each got our first games. My brother got Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World (the same copy that I still have to this day), while I got this game. I was really into Battlebots as a real wee one (I was 3-5 years old during its original airing), and even though I would only rarely get to stay up long enough to watch it, I was obsessed. So, it was only fitting that my parents picked this out for me.

I have more memories of the TV show than I do of this game. I have maybe one flash of a childhood memory of playing this game around when I first got it, but I still remember it enough that when I walked into this local game store and saw that they not only had this game in stock, but had it complete-in-box. And, not only did they have it complete-in-box, but it was $14.99! A gem hidden amongst all of the $100 Pokémon and GameCube games. I brought it home, excited, honestly, to just hold one of those nice paper boxes that GBA games came in. Packaging that I missed going to KB Toys and seeing on the shelves behind the electronics section's counter...

Of course, however, the game sucks absolute balls and shaft. There's a career mode, where, as one could infer from the game's title, you build your own little robot. The thing is, this game doesn't exactly take from established racing and robot fighting genres in order to make customization intuitive and easy to understand, but is more like a proper Battlebots simulation. You have to make weight, and also make enough money to fix your robot, or just replace the parts, in a UI that is not easy on the eyes, or the brain. Its biggest crime, really, though, is you can't feel the hits, or the scrapes, or the shocks. The sound design plays like it just took from a factory stock of old sound effects that easily fit on a cartridge of a game with a third-party licensed IP budget, so it never feels like you smashing two cool ass fucking robots together! Which, now that I think of it, all of the different weapons are inconsequential because of this. Buzzsaws, hammers, pincers, the cast of Battlebots is so diverse but, in this game, you are just aiming a sprite at another sprite with tank controls. In face, it's a game of tank with bumper cars instead of tanks.

Also, why was every other fucking GBA game isometric 3D? What's up with that, huh?

This game, however, did spark some joy after abandoning the career mode for the VS. mode that has some all-star (robot) names that actually surfaced some subconscious memories, which was really nice. Unfortunately, it's another one of those Game Boy Advance games that I play once as a little goof and then let it sit in my collection forever. At the very least, it will sit in a box :)

Not my thing at all, also not what I was expecting, though. SaGa: Scarlet Ambitions is not your average JRPG. What I found inside this more obscure Square IP is basically a visual novel with puzzle-like turn-based combat. It's not exactly obtuse, but I wouldn't call it intuitive. Very non-traditional character progression coupled with battles that can take more than a few tries just creates a scenario where I'm not really into a game at all. Not to mention that the story writing here is the really reason this isn't getting three stars. I was playing more for the battles and just couldn't be fucked to care about the story at all, even if the characters looked at least a little interesting. Maybe Urpina's story is the weakest and a different character's route might suck me in more, but that'll have to be down the line.

Yesterday I re-downloaded and logged on one last time to transfer some favorite Pokémon to my Home account one last time before fully retiring this game. I played for the first year this game was out and then on-and-off throughout the years up until some time in the end of last year. Same with Fire Emblem Heroes, I just have slowly lost my taste for these daily time-sinks on mobile. It’s fun to catch Pokémon while you’re going out for a walk, but much like every modern Pokémon game it has become only truly enjoyable by a devoted minority. Sometimes on TikTok I’ll scroll past a livestream of this game and see the interface that the really hardcore players use on this app and it just depresses me! This game that barely has a battle mechanic has become so much about battling and it really baffles me. The fact that this game has a spot at Pokémon’s championships alongside the core games and the card game is insane to me. It’s fun to catch Pokémon while you’re on a walk, but this game became so much bigger than “just going out for a walk,” and I think for the worse.

I mean, yeah, everyone’s gonna say “it’s Tetris,” but the thing is, that’s the thing! When people talk about video games as art they often just talk about cinematic games, or games that tell a nice story, because to a lot of people, art is just about looking really pretty and telling an actually thoughtful story. One that, at the very least, wasn’t merely built around getting a character from level-to-level. The “video games as art” discussion rarely talks about perfect syntheses of interactive media. Tetris is a perfect being, especially as a portable interactive experience in a world before all of the puzzle games we have now. It is the ‘Citizen Kane’ of puzzle video games, but also such an antithesis to Citizen Kane as an American production. A product of the Soviet Union, Tetris is for the people, a pure creation of humanity made for such a beautifully simple reason: to be played. There will always be people who read the Bible, there will always be people who gaze at the Mona Lisa, there will always be people who play Tetris.

Wow, what a bummer. Was hoping that this being developed by Intelligent Systems and having ‘Wars’ in the title meant this would just end up being Advance Wars but with monsters from the Dragon Quest series. Was also hoping this might have some sort of Dragon Quest Monsters kind of story, too, or something akin to ‘Rocket Slime’. Unfortunately, it’s just a little mostly-multiplayer game with the only single player being a training mode. The strategy element doesn’t feel right because the amount of strategy one might use is about the aame one might for any turn-based RPG. I might’ve bothered to complete the training mode as a stand-in for the campaign if the gameplay wasn’t intensely boring. Feels like a mini-game that might be included in a Mario Party-esque spin-off of this series. I guess I didn’t really remember that most DSiWare was designed around updating the DS with smartphone-style apps, so most of the games designed for DSiWare end up not really being full-fledged games. I have to go back and download those couple that I really loved on the DSi back in the day, though, and have some fun with some Real Shit.