This is one of those games that feels like it was made specifically for me. Pretty much everything it does is exactly the sort of thing I love in a game. The music is consistently great, from the area themes, boss themes (especially Elvis's theme), and the completely ridiculous credits theme. The visuals are well done too. Environments can be somewhat bland at times, but the absurd character designs and incredibly satisfying animation more than makes up for it. Level design is shockingly varied, with more wide open stages, to linear stages, to mini-boss focused levels or stages with more out-there gimmicks that keep things fresh. The combat is incredibly tight and satisfying. The customizability of it is very rewarding to experiment with, and led to a lot of fun finding ways to maximize my damage output and keep my options open. By the end I could pull of crazy combos while splicing in guard breakers and then end it off with a super long juggle combo. The combat is greatly enhanced by the loud and powerful sound design, which really drives the impact of combat home. The story is fairly enjoyable, especially since it just exists to keep up the dumb tone and make stupid jokes. Some jokes don't work too well, but the tone is always kept intact. The challenge is an interesting thing to note as well. I find that just progressing through the game is usually not THAT hard, excluding some annoying bosses here and there. However, mastering this game is a truly herculean feat I will likely never accomplish. I feel like I could keep getting better and better at this game over time, which makes the prospect of a future replay sound fun. In short, this is everything I want in a game.
Difficult? Check. Simple with hidden depth? Check. Room for Mastery and experimentation? Check. Fast Pace, Stupid Tone, Great music? Check. This game rocks.

One of the most creative and insane games I've ever played. It takes several mechanics based off of computers and builds on them in a satisfying way, somehow creating an adventure-puzzle game out of navigating a pc. It's insane to me that I played a game where installing an antivirus is a game mechanic. How the game stretches depth and satisfying puzzle solving out of it's setup is incredibly impressive to me. Not only that, but the game ended up being much deeper and more heartfelt than I had expected. Combining that with it's incredibly varied and excellent soundtrack and the insane and wonderfully done visuals, you've got something really special here. I do wonder if the game comes across well to those who don't have PC experience. For those who do, it's amazing.

This game is pretty fun, but occasionally feels half-baked. I like the shift to a mission structure instead of being like the last few. It gives this game a distinct identity and most of the missions are pretty fun. Some are annoying, mostly coming down to a handful of vehicle missions I didn't really enjoy. Sometimes mechanics feel underutilized and concepts just don't feel fully fleshed out. However, this game has had the highest highs I've felt with this series. Playing on the highest difficulty resulted in many encounters where two mistakes meant death, and it was fast, intense, and everything I want out of a combat game. This is helped by a great soundtrack and an enjoyably cynical story. While it doesn't feel as complete as ratchet 2 or 3, it's still a great time with some of the most fun combat the series has had yet.

A fairly substantial upgrade from the original and a great game in it's own right. It's got a lot of fun new mechanics, well-justified fanservice, a good amount of variety, and just about everything you'd want in a half life game. It does feel a tad excessive in fanservice at times, but that's fine for a mod. Compared to the first, the game is much better at conveying information to the player. I got lost much less often, although there were a few instances of poorly telegraphed environments. If you like half-life, check this out for sure.

I don't understand why this exists. Persona 3 is a deeply flawed game that could benefit a lot from a remake to overhaul many of its weaker elements. But from what I played (granted that wasn't a whole lot, so take some of the following with a grain of salt) it's just Persona 3 again.

P3 is a hard game to come back to, especially after P4 and P5. P3's dungeon is dull and tedious from a visual and gameplay design perspective. The story is often unfocused and takes a long-ass time for anything interesting to happen, and even then these plot moments rarely have much of an impact thanks to how dull the entire cast of characters is.

As someone who's already played portable, it feels like a waste of time to play reload. It's probably the best version of the game, but is it really worth shelling out an additional 50 bucks over the portable remaster? Why spend so much time to just make a slightly better version of P3? They had all the opportunity to do something radically different, what with the portable version being readily available. But they decided to remake it in the safest, easiest way possible, never touching up on any of the fundamental problems.

Xenoblade X is a very messy game. There's a lot of mechanics at play here, a lot of story elements, and weird ideas. While there are a lot of times where it feels disjointed, it oddly works much more often than it doesn't.

Combat is a real highlight here. It feels like familiar xenoblade action, except with the ability to swap between melee and ranged attacks. A major new change is TP, which is built up by using certain attacks that can be spent on other arts. More importantly, TP is used to activate overdrive. Overdrive is an enhanced mode where arts come back very quickly, and can be perpetually maintained by earning more and more TP. Keeping it going as long as you can is some of the most fun I've had with any combat system ever. Unfortunately, some of that goes out the window when skells are introduced. As fun as it is punching stuff with a giant robot, combat just feels less mechanically complex. Overdrive is no longer a hectic rush to keep it going, but is just luck-based instead. It's a shame that the strongest option isn't the most fun.

Exploration is standard xenoblade fare for the most part, but the open-world setup is quite fun, especially when skells get introduced. The limited ground movement is replaced by jumping all over the place at mach 10, and it feels great.

Quests are a bit messy. Sidequests are comparable to other xenoblade games, but it can be rough trying to find the right enemy to kill or item to find after Xenoblade 1's Definitive edition perfected this style of quest system. Story quests are straightforward and have a lot of great moments. Affinity quests are okay to pretty good, really just depends on if I like the characters in them or not.

The FrontierNav system is very unusual. It's all about strategically placing different types of probes to gather materials. It's alright, but feels a bit complicated for not a lot of fun extra moments. It often is more of a limiter on stuff that doesn't seem like it should be limited.

The music and presentation is good. The area themes are great, and a lot of the vocal themes are also great, but for different reasons. Area design is sharp and cool looking. Only real downside is that the character designs are somewhat dull.

The story is one of the more unfinished feeling elements. There's a great premise, a lot of excellent moments, some good sections of character writing, cool reveals. But this is on top of a disjointed structure and a core cast that feels flat for the vast majority of the game. For example, Lin was quite boring for most of the game until she randomly got a bunch of great moments in the last few chapters. The villains don't feel like a huge threat and reveals tied to them feel underwhelming. This would be fine if the core cast had more going on.

Alright that's enough essay writing. Game's good.

I love games that are stupid fast, difficult, and with a lot of room for mastery. Pizza tower strikes that niche spot on, and has quickly become an all-time favorite for me.

Let's start with presentation, because hoo boy is it great. The ms-paint style linework with twitchy and over-the-top animation is so satisfying to watch. The stages all have fun themes with a ton of variance, enemies and background details are full of life and detail, and it all brings such a strong and great personality to the game. The cutscenes are fun, boss intros and animations are stupid, and I love it. The music is top notch stuff, with a ton of musical variety and it's pretty much all great. I especially liked the escape themes, War, The final boss theme, the final escape theme, and oregano desert. But there's really not any duds among the group.

The controls are excellent, and can feel a bit twitchy at first but really come together as you get better. Soon enough I was blasting through levels using all my moves in tandem and it makes just replaying a random level a joy. I'm definitely going to speedrun this game after I 100% it.

The level design is packed with weird ideas that are memorable and fun, with a constant stream of gimmicks that get used really well. Finding secrets is quite fun too, and going for P-ranks (where you have to do everything in a level while never dropping your combo) has been one of the most fun things I've done in a video game.

Pizza Tower is a masterpiece. I love every single thing about this game, and I will likely keep coming back to this game every once in a while for a long time. I recommend this to pretty much anyone who enjoys having fun.

I don't tend to explore much when I play games, but something about Outer Wilds made exploration very compelling and satisfying. Wandering about was rewarded with knowledge rather than an item, and learning bits and pieces of information that seems pointless at first but later seeing how it becomes useful was quite satisfying. Wandering into a planet only to get eaten by an angler fish was terrifying, but later finding out how to avoid them was great. The whole game was basically like this, constantly learning new things and finding new leads which was very fun to do. My one major complaint is that within the game's loop, there are some events that require quite a lot of waiting. That got dull when I needed to wait on sand to drain away a few times. Other than that, this game's pretty darn great.

While I feel that this game is a very mixed bag of quality, it has so much charm, creativity, and variety that the occasionally weaker points don't hinder it too much for me. This remake looks great, and adds so much atmosphere and detail that it feels like a true evolution from the source material. The music is excellent, both in terms of composition and the rearrangement. This remake also adds quite a bit more information to make some confusing points of the original feel much better. The only thing I like less than what I've seen from the original is that each era has the same textboxes, instead of different fonts and cursors for each. Feels a bit lackluster in comparison. Overall though, as a remake, it's very successful. Now, for each chapter, in the order that I played it.

Prehistory: Probably my least favorite. I really like the simplistic story told without words, and crafting was kinda fun. But the pace is all over the place, with long bouts of combat or really long story segments. The difficulty also feels weird, and the gimmick of smelling enemies is just not that fun.

Wild West: Easily one of my favorites. The premise is great, it's really fun in execution, it feels tense, the balance of combat to exploration is great, excellent all around.

Near Future: Fun, but had a few weak spots. It felt overall too easy, and it had a few points where the player would have to run back and forth through the same area over and over. The plot is fun and the ending is really cool.

Distant Future: I like the more story focused direction this one takes. The mystery and horror elements elevate it a lot, but it could have made the monster that chases you more threatening. Gets a bit repetitive since a lot of the chapter is running back and forth, but once danger is added it's much less of an issue.

Edo Japan: Another excellent one. The combat here feels challenging and rewarding, and the game gives the player a lot of leniency for how they want to play it. The atmosphere is great, the tricks and traps of the dungeon are fun, great all around.

Imperial China: This one has a great idea, but I wish it was less repetitive. The goal is to find 3 apprentices and train them, before switching control to the strongest of them. This results in just fighting the same apprentice over and over, and there's no reason to train all 3. Still neat, and the beginning and end are quite cool. The middle's the only bit that drags.

Present: I like this one a lot. The tournament setup keeps things quick and varied, and trying to get your opponent to hit you to steal their moves is really fun. Another one of my favorites.

Middle Ages: It's cool, but goes on a bit long. Most of it feels somewhat standard, but the back half is really great and is super interesting for the overall story.

Final: This chapter rocks. It's all about exploring to recruit all of the previous protagonists, and then preparing yourself by doing mini dungeons that are all pretty varied and cool. Some are kind of annoying, but most are fun and unique. It reminded me a lot of ff6's second half, which grants you a lot of freedom with the ability to confront the final boss at any time. Also the evil version of the final chapter is super cool.

IN CONCLUSION: Yeah this game's sick. I do wish the remake was a bit harder across the board, since I didn't have much difficulty save a few bosses and the last chapter. Maybe some sort of scaling that makes each chapter harder the later you take it on? Anyways, game's cool. Might be more fitting to be a 7, but I dunno.

Pikmin 2 is fun, but it felt like a big downgrade from the first for me.

A lot of the good of the original is still intact. All the above-ground gameplay is fun, and has the same fun charm as before with some neat new gameplay changes and quality of life improvements.

However, the problems come in with one big change, and one big removal. That change is that there is no longer a time limit on days. While I'm sure plenty of people prefer this less-stressful approach, I feel that removing that framing device makes the game feel a lot less fun. In the original, timed obstacles were interesting. It was an important decision to leave pikmin at certain spots doing things like tearing down a wall while taking care of something in a seperate section of the level. It made multitasking and efficiency feel important. While you still CAN multitask, it's easier to simply bring the whole squad around at once since there's no reason to take risks anymore. The game IS still fun, but less so.

Now something I like a lot less are the caves. It often feels like I spend way more time down there than I do aboveground, which is a shame since I enjoy those sections a lot less. The lack of a timer until sunset removes yet another thing I really like about pikmin, and the randomly designed level design is often not interesting or frustrating. One example was when I ran into a mortar enemy on a small bridge. If I didn't deal with it, it was a major threat. But if I attacked it, it would shake my pikmin off into a pit. Basically it was impossible to not lose pikmin, which is a real problem when I'm on the 6th of 8 layers that constantly drained my resources.

I want to reiterate that I like this game, but compared to the original, if feels like very little of it was an improvement on the formula. I hope 3 can focus back a bit more and truly improve upon the first game's successes.

While it's a cool progression for the series and I'd love to see this format expanded, the game's just tedious. Catching pokemon is the main priority and gets very dull due to how simple and repetitive it is. The visuals aren't very good either. I like the idea of the art direction, but you don't see the paintbrush Japanese aesthetic in the game. The environments are bland, the lighting isn't very good, foliage looks amateur. They really should have doubled down on shading and stylizing more. Combat has some neat changes, but I often got comboed by an enemy for reasons out of my control. I wish I liked this game more, but the fundamentals of the game just gets very dull. There's nothing interesting to find by exploring. Basically no monuments, cool events, memorable moments. It's just more regular pokemon, some items, or a small purple spirit. Nothing about this game draws me in.

Zero 2 is an excellent example of a sequel. It's not content to be an improved version of the first, instead adding so many changes to the gameplay and structure that it feels entirely new.

Starting with the sidescrolling action, the controls feel a bit tighter. But the biggest change is that the environments are far more varied in the obstacles they present, and have some very clever use of hopping in and out of the tank.

Top-Down action is far improved as well. The new counter option makes combat more dynamic, and one of the counters is a dash move that makes moving around more fun. This added on top of improved weapons, far better boss fights, and more interesting gimmicks makes these a huge highlight compared to the slightly dull sections present in the original.

The structure is now about flying through space to different planets, which results in a much faster pace and greater variety. It's about the same length as the original, but feels twice as long thanks to how much more stuff happens here.

The story has seen an uptick as well. The stakes and goals are more clearly defined, and the new characters are a fun addition. Jason and Eve's dynamic gets a lot more time to shine, and they stay a very likable protagonist duo.

Music and visuals are improved, although a bit less obviously. Jason's sprites are much better, and his new design features a cape that gives his movement a bit more visual interest. Some sequences, especially near the end, are given a lot of visual flourish that really sells it.

All in all, a shining example of a great sequel. Taking the solid base of the original and cranking up the speed and complexity makes this one of Inti Create's best.

P-06 is an unfortunate reminder that some games are flawed to the core, and no amount of polish can make it good without fundamentally redoing it.

Before I say anything else, I respect the passion that's gone into this. Porting the game can't have been easy, and it must have taken a lot of commitment.

That being said, this is just a better version of an awful game that elevates it to the level of "just bad." There are some good tweaks. It feels a bit better to play, it's a bit more functional, and a lot of particularly frustrating parts have been polished up here and there. Also, boss fights haven't been added yet, which is definitely a positive since none of them were good.

The game's fundamental issues remain. A generally stilted gamefeel, levels with a lot of stop and go, an over-reliance on boring combat, and levels that go on to long but simultaneously feel like they never get going, just repeating their few gimmicks over and over with no evolution.

Sonic's campaign is still the highlight of the game, with mostly just platforming and a greater frequency of fun sections. The camera is a problem across the entire game, but it's more prevalent here as it whips around all the time that really hurts the sense of speed you should be getting. However, it's a mostly enjoyable time.

Shadow's story is just a worse version of sonic's, taking greater emphasis on clunky vehicles and so much of that boring combat. It's just not very fun, and gets tedious quickly.

Silver's is still terrible. He feels slow, and is slow. His telekinesis AND focus on combat requires him to stop constantly to grab boxes and throw them, which is not interesting or fun in the slightest. I really have a hard time gauging depth with his float ability, which makes it a pain to use. He just never gets going, constantly doing uninteresting platforming only to get stopped by a dumb puzzle or boring combat that requires you to wait for the enemies to act first.

Unfortunately, I didn't really enjoy most of my time with this. It's a valiant effort, but 06 is an unfixable game without completely remaking it (silver especially). I feel bad for the developer.

Man, I heard some people arguing that this game really isn't that bad. THEY LIED, this really is one of the worst games ever made. Out of the three main campaigns, Sonic was the closest to being tolerable. Even then, the occasionally decent level design is horrifically marred by the controls that are somehow too slow but still too slippery. Shadow and Silver's campaigns are GOD AWFUL. Shadow's is the most focused on combat, which means just mashing a button for a billion years through the same handful of copy-pasted, nothing level design and an occasional buggy, boring vehicle segment. Silver's is also completely terrible. Silver is SO SLOW and also has a ton of enemies to fight that are a complete nightmare to fight with his control scheme. The rare moments of fun in this game lasted about a minute at most and were immediately followed up by something awful. The game also looks TERRIBLE. Also the boss fights are a complete drag that take way way too long. The environments are flat and dull, the animations are buggy and choppy, the characters look terrible, the lighting sucks, the character designs, voice acting, none of it is anything I would call good. The one redeemable factor is that the majority of the music is good. Some tracks suck, but most are enjoyable. All in all, this game sucks. It sucks hard. If you like this game, you're a bad person.