I love everything about Ghostwire: Tokyo, except for actually playing it.

The game has massive Vibes, and feels almost like a first-person action spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei. The blend of supernatural elements and technology is interesting (transferring spirits via payphone devices is very SMT), and the art design is top-notch. The story is good enough, following a guy who is brought back from death by a spirit that co-inhabits his body. There's nothing incredible there, but the banter between the two can be entertaining.

It's unfortunate, then, that everything else doesn't live up to the game's style. The combat, where you launch various projectiles via hand-signs, looks pretty, but has no sense of impact. Your default "rapid-fire" attack, Air, particularly feels like an ineffective peashooter. Water is far more useful, being the equivalent of a shotgun, and Fire is your "rocket launcher". They can all be upgraded, but that's another issue...

See, almost every upgrade only exists to make the game feel slightly less sluggish. Normally, when you damage enemies enough, you can rip their cores out to finish them. You don't actually have to, but it gives you some ammo back. Kind of like a Glory Kill from DOOM or something. The problem is that enemies can interrupt this animation. So the game's solution? Give you a bunch of upgrades that make it faster. Or give you other core-ripping abilities that can't be interrupted. My solution? Just stop doing it and hit them a couple more times to kill them.

Other upgrades are similar: higher rate of fire. Slightly wider splash damage radius. It's all very incremental and feels like a waste of time. That's appropriate, though, because most of this game feels like a waste of time. If it had simply been a straight-ahead, linear first-person action game, the combat's flaws could be more easily overlooked. However, because More Hours = Better Than, the fine folks at Tango Gameworks (or, speculating, their parent company Bethesda) decided this should be an open world game with copy-pasted sidequests and, uh... 250,000 spirits scattered around the map to absorb.

Yeah. 250,000. Sure, those are in bundles of, like, 100-300 at a time, but holy cow, that's still a LOT of things to absorb!

And then, if all that wasn't bad enough, there are segments of the game where you're separated from your Ghost Man, so you have none of your shitty little magics, and instead have to rely on the Very Good™ stealth.

I liked talking to the Tanuki. They were cool.

I have not played GTA V since its original release on PS3, so I was prepared for disappointment when revisiting it. Instead, I think I liked it even more than I did then.

Of course, a large part of this is because of what's come since: Red Dead Redemption 2 is so laboriously paced, its devotion to "realism" at the expense of gameplay fresh in my mind, that it makes returning to a Video Game-Ass Video Game a pleasure. Sure, you can hold all the guns you want. Need to be on the other side of the map? You can drive there in a few minutes, or take a taxi to get there instantly.

The quicker pacing is also evident in the story. GTAV, unlike other GTA's, doesn't really take many detours from the main story. Apart from Franklin and Trevor's introductions, almost everything here is in service of the FIB/Big Heist/Devin storyline.

And, hey, it looks pretty good and runs well. Not too surprising given the original game's age, but it was a technical miracle at the time. They didn't have to do too much other than upping the resolution and adding RT shadows.

At the moment, it's $10 on PS5 even if you never bought it digitally before. I'd recommend revisiting it if you haven't played it in a while, and definitely checking it out if you haven't played it at all. There will probably never be another Rockstar game like it.

The newest Kirby takes a lot of inspiration from Super Mario 3D World, which is definitely a good thing. It's a pleasant, though mind-numbingly easy, trek through a variety of worlds with fantastic art direction. The optional objectives are a neat way to increase replay value, and there's a good amount of secrets to find in each level. I would have liked more Copy abilities, in particular I miss the Fighter ability, but the various Mouthful Modes make up for it.

On a technical level, it's a mess, with a low resolution, zero anti-aliasing, and transparencies that are dithered like it's a PS1 game. The framerate can be unstable in some areas too, but I found it mostly solid. It's a Switch game, though, so all of this is to be expected.

And, by the way, this game does follow in the grand tradition of Kirby games having bizarre, dark ending sequences. This time, it's equal parts Resident Evil, Oddworld, Bloodborne, and Devil May Cry. And that's AFTER the world that looks like Hell on Earth from Doom Eternal.

Recommended.

I had a great time with the first 3/4ths of this game. There's a nice sense of exploration, and though there's obviously some padding with a game of this type/size, it didn't feel barren or monotonous like many others (looking at you, Breath of the Wild). There's a good balance between the open world environments and the "dungeons" that feel like regular Souls levels.

Unfortunately, after Morgott, the game tanks hard. Pouring one out for my fellow Strength builders, because they decided to make subsequent bosses straight out of Sekiro, and actively hostile to anyone who isn't a fast weapon iframe master. Bosses healing on hits, or stacking dots on you even when blocked? Now that's some garbage.

Then, finally, you get to the last boss. It's alright! And then you get to the second phase, which is maybe the single worst boss in any Souls game. After about 5 hours I finally won because it glitched out and stopped moving. An appropriately anticlimactic ending to a game I enjoyed once upon a time.