STOP MAKING MEGA MAN

ROBOT MASTERS WERE SUPPOSED TO BE GIVEN REAL JOBS

YEARS OF MEGA MAN ENTRIES yet NO-REAL WORLD USE FOUND for STAR MAN

Wanted a strong and tough robot master for a laugh? We had one for that. It was called "GUTS MAN"

"Yes please give me WAVE MAN. Please give me GRAVITY MAN" - Robot masters dreamed up by the utterly deranged

"Hello I would like to fight Gyro Man please"
They have played us for absolute fools

not to beat a dead horse but persona 5 is the epitome of style over substance

one of the most overhyped games of all time, and i kind of regret the 140 hours i sunk into it when i played it initially in 2019. i liked it at the time but it was also the first big jrpg i had played at the time, and the more games in the same genre or that tackled the same themes i experienced, the less love in my heart i had for persona 5. theres a lot there but other than the aesthetics (which im not a fan of) and the music (which is basically just baby's first acid jazz sampling) there isn't much to whats there. the characters give you the facade of being deep and intricate when they get introduced but unless you're akechi or fucking morgana you either don't get development past your introduction or that development practically gets disregarded for the rest of the story.

the story itself is also noncommittal to the idea of rebellion that it sells itself on. empowering the underdogs of society but only in a way that supports that status quo. we wouldn't want to actually try to say anything now would we? the closest thing to challenging the status quo that these kids actually do is by targeting a single corrupt politician.

i know there was a lot of drama a while ago about people experiencing the game by watching it and how that "isn't how you're supposed to" but you genuinely lose out on nothing and i honestly might have a higher opinion of this game if it was just the story bits and not the insufferably droning jrpg with a 3/10 dating sim tacked onto it.

overall i just genuinely do not like this game and after 3 years of stewing on those feelings i don't think much is going to change my mind. i think a large part of that is that i don't like the presentation much (it wore off on me pretty quickly when i initially played and i never reacclimated to it) and the ost is only really good for 2 or 3 songs unless you've just never listened to any form of jazz fusion or its derivatives.

i wouldn't call persona 5 a bad game but with how long it is and how much time i invested into it, i can't help but be frustrated with how shockingly little i actually got out of the experience positively.

Another reviewer here said "Great until it isn't" and I can't think of a better way to phrase it. The parts of this game where you're engaging with the dialogue, soaking in the atmosphere and trying your best to play the game of vampiric politics as an exploited newcomer are where the game truly shines as a fantastic avenue to experience the World of Darkness setting. The facial animations, if a tad overwrought, are seriously impressive for a 2004 game, much less one of this budget. The music too, it's pure late 90s/early 00s goth and I very much enjoyed it. To this day, no game has better player dance animations.

While in the first half of my playthrough, I thought I'd probably end up doing multiple playthroughs of this game, I was having so much fun and I couldn't wait to try out the different clans, but man oh man, then you get to that second half. It's an extremely frustrating and frankly boring time trudging through labyrinthian combat section after combat section to face tedious bosses. One of the final bosses actually made me laugh in how ridiculously stupid and poorly designed it is. I had a character who was fairly specialised in combat and had powerful disciplines, I can only imagine it'd be next to impossible if you leaned more into stealth or speech. It's not as if you get any experience or rewards for killing enemies, outside of ammo, either.

I really wish I could give this 4 or 5 stars and if the game continued on the foot it started off on, I'd have gladly done it, but at this point I'd hardly recommend the game outside of that first half. It just wasn't worth finishing at all. Oh also, it goes without saying, you need the unofficial patch - even with it, I was still getting stuck in the geometry on those last few rushed levels.

I went into P5T with mixed feelings. This is the 4th or 5th spinoff and it's been about 6-7 years since we first met the cast. For a game that was originally about 'taking your time' and letting time and experience change you, every new release aside from Royal has flattened the characters more and more. I wasn't expecting a ton of character development, nor is there any to be found.

As a Persona game there's a requisite amount of storytelling and visual novel elements so even when there's not much to say, half or more of the game takes place in dialogue exchanges. The character interactions hit all the familiar beats and the humor is there, but it never feels fresh. Ryuji and Morgana are at each other's throats, Yusuke is aloof, Haru is naive, etc. All of this feels like it's weighing the game down a bit, and I don't think the new characters or their troubles particularly carry the game. I like Erina and Kasakube well enough but there's not much substance to work with.

As far as gameplay, this game is very easy on Hard, and on Merciless it just seems to add more enemies to the point where it feels tedious instead of like a real challenge. Each character gets a "1 More" every time they knock down an enemy, and additionally you get an overpowered triangle attack, so it feels very easy to exploit these things. The only real challenge comes from beating these little puzzleboxes in as few turns as possible. It never feels like you're in any danger of actually getting killed or a game over. Instead its like the game wants you to eventually win, and come back later to get a better score. I understand some people may like gameplay loop but I think it takes the stakes out of the game.

Even if a character gets KO'd there's a baton pass so that they get replaced by someone with full HP and SP, so it can be advantageous to kill your own character. The game also has a cool spin on elemental attacks, where they work as status effects, so things like Bufu freezes, Garu knocks enemy back, and Psio hypnotizes the enemy... but it doesn't really get more complex than that and adding a few exploding barrels to the maps.

It's a very generous game if it's what you're into, and I can see why some people would love it, but it's just missing the stakes I am looking for from a strategy game.

It's goofy, it's stupid, it's humorous, and hilariously all over the place. The game has a neat little story with some funny characters, but doesn't do much beyond initial shock factors and balls-to-the-wall visual design that is endearingly charming. The story is told well enough, but seems to overgeneralize some real issues and stereotype many kinds of people, which isn't necessarily bad if properly accounted for, but makes the game feel a little too generically corporate in a lot of ways. Overall though it's a fun, goofy game that can keep you visually engaged and that makes a very strong attempt to talk about mature themes that are very real and very well done through well-written characters, but the presentation just made it feel incredibly jarring to me.

The last time I played Pokémon Trading Card Game for the GameBoy was probably a few years after it came out in America. The original cartridge came with a promotional card that I no longer have. Pretty sure it was a Meowth. It was my first card game beyond Go Fish or Crazy Eights (UNO) via playing cards, and my 7-year-old brain could barely wrap its head around the concept of "strategy" or "games with Pokémon in them that played differently from the mainline games".

I didn't have any understanding of "deck synergy," and spent most of my time playing decks consisting of grass-types with "flip a coin, if heads, add a status ailment" effects, praying that the coin landed on heads 100% of the time, and becoming convinced that the coin-flip was either rigged or required specific timing that I was somehow messing up.

It's not rigged. At least not in the way I thought it was.

The furthest I ever got back in the day was (somehow) to the "Elite Four" of the game, where I would proceed to get stomped by the second Grand Master over and over.

Now that I'm an adult with experience and understanding of trading card game fundamentals, and that Pokémon Trading Card Game was added to the Switch's "Nintendo Switch Online" games lineup, I decided to give it another go and see if I could actually finish the game.

I overheard my partner and their friend talking about starting their own files of the game, mentioning that Water types are generally the best, and that Fire types are the worst, so obviously I went with a Fire deck. I can only assume that this applies to the other "and Friends" decks, but the Charmander and Friends deck sucks. I don't even mean in which it can't win, but in that it can barely even play the game. I probably found myself getting so frustrated as a child and hitting roadblocks of "I don't get it" because not only does the starter deck have way too few energy cards, but the only real fast way to get energy cards consistently is by dueling Aaron, a lab assistant in Dr. Mason's lab who gives you a booster pack of energy cards when you beat him. He's no slouch when all you have is the starter deck.

After getting enough energy cards from Aaron and grinding quick duels with the easier club member NPCs (and pulling a Charizard in one of the booster packs), I thought it would be funny if my deck pooled all of its resources into just getting Charizard onto the field to sweep teams. While very funny, this eventually proved to be inefficient and borderline unusable due to both Charizard's Fire Spin move requiring the discard of two fire energy cards, and that I only had a single Charizard card at the time.

So I looked through my cards and realized that a bunch of the Fire Pokemon have the move Flamethrower, which functions similar to Charizard's Fire Spin, except it does 50 damage instead of 100 (still very good), and only requires a discard of one fire energy card. Monkey brain activated, I pooled my resources together with the sole focus of using Flamethrower over and over again, and I eventually settled on the Funny Flamethrower Deck.

Visual representation of how the Funny Flamethrower deck works.

Visual representation of the Funny Flamethrower deck's biggest fear.

The Funny Flamethrower Deck was some of the most jank fun I've had in a card game. By the time it was ready, I don't think I had a single Medal (Badge equivalent), and with two exceptions (Joshua of the Water club and Grand Master Jack) I cleared the whole game with this deck alone.

After getting killed on turn one to the final boss thanks to an equally funny lost coin flip, poor hand including a single Charmander with 50 health, and the combination of this bullshit Zapdos card that does 30 damage do your opponent once it is played and Scoop Up, the satisfaction of completing the game after my younger self couldn't is extremely palpable.

Pokémon Trading Card Game is jank, bullshit fun, and a great way to learn the basics of the actual TCG itself, if you have actual interest in playing it in real life. However, modern Pokémon TCG has a bunch of new mechanics that I am not interested in even a little, so I'm at least glad I got to experience the old school edition of the game in all its unbalanced glory.

Also, I'm profoundly happy to confirm that Imakuni? was in fact real and not a fever dream I had.

For months, I was in doubt about paying for this game. I saw some reviews, but I was not certain if it would be fun to play. So, I decided to give Marvel's Midnight Suns a chance, and I can confidently say it was one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had in the gaming industry in recent years.

Marvel's Midnight Suns is a unique blend of real-time strategy games like XCOM and card games like Hearthstone. I'm a big fan of games like XCOM, but I usually don't enjoy card games, which made me hesitant about this one. However, in the end, the card aspect is the heart of this game, and it enhances the strategy element, adding complexity and an element of luck.

About the gameplay, you have a stage with certain objectives, and you control a group of heroes facing off against enemies. Each hero has cards that require a certain amount of power to use and a designated area to cause damage. This requires you to strategically position your characters to attack your foes while avoiding enemy attacks. Meanwhile, you also need to manage your deck of cards.

The story is interesting and focuses on lesser-known heroes, although you still have a team that includes Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Captain Marvel. The connections between all the heroes are well-developed, and you'll become more interested in these lesser-known characters and how they come together to prevent the end of the world.

One downside for me is the hub area where you spend time between missions. It's quite large but not very enjoyable to explore.

The graphics may not be top-notch, but that wasn't a problem for me. During the missions, the game looks more beautiful because you get to appreciate the stage from an overhead perspective.

Marvel's Midnight Suns is a delightful surprise, and it's a shame that it doesn't receive more attention. It's a fantastic game that deserves more recognition. If you enjoy strategy games or are looking for something unique, I highly recommend giving it a chance. In my opinion, it's worth every penny!

Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

To be honest, If I had played this game in a bubble with no prior experience from any other games I would have really really liked it. Unfortunately I have played Sekiro and Elden Ring. This game's parry system is ass, enemies delay their attacks that makes it look silly and not fun to play against, and delayed attacks mostly have animations that you cannot physically react to, so you have to memorise how long you have to wait which is not fun for me in the slightest. Towards the end almost every boss has a second phase which gets tiring really fast. The element system is good and weapon alteration is fun. That's about it, it's a solid game that is pushed back by trying to make it difficult without going through the right procedures and it feeling artificial afterwards.