Parry Nightmare is something of a bullet hell game, where instead of solely trying to dodge your main form of attack is parrying approaching enemies. You play as a soul, trapped in a lucid nightmare along with your demonic guardian Honnou, in which you must fight and reflect on major points of trauma and stress in your life.

I have a few points of contention with this game. I will start first by saying that aesthetically and atmospherically, it succeeds hard. Despite being short, it gives off a well polished and kind of eccentric vibe... when I first started playing, I thought it had a feeling like Paper Mario or Warioware though the gameplay didnt reflect that, of course.

The game is hard. It might be one of the most difficult games I have ever played. It is not like other bullet hells, where they slowly ease you into things, with your safety net of bombs or other clearing objects for when you get stuck. You stand in a circular room, enemies coming from all sides, your main point of interaction is hitting A when an enemy gets within a certain range of you to parry. Honnou will then shoot when they are down and you can collect a light fragment from them, 100 being needed to beat the level... though, one light drop from one enemy only seems to be .1 instead of a full figure, which isnt that big of a problem, but you also cant see at first and need to collect 70 of these light drops to have a full range of the room. You can not take many hits, and when youre down to your last health you become sluggish until you gain some more (which pretty much means youre going to die), your clearing bomb isnt on hand but instead its built up when you do well, so if you get hit once or parry early you can lose it and become overwhelmed. Bosses can also only be hit with this attack and take up a large portion of the arena. Even though traditional bullet hells are long, somehow dying in this feels worse. The levels are short, can be beaten in under 5 minutes, but somehow every time I died I felt like it wasnt my fault. Enemies move very, very fast and its incredibly easy to just have a boss sit its ass right down on you when youre sluggish and can barely move. It feels like I make one tiny mistake, parry early, my level goes down (as it does when you miss a parry), then Honnou isnt strong enough to fight off everyone and I get overwhelmed and die and now its dark again and uuuuugh. If there was one safety net (like a mid level checkpoint) I feel like it would be much more manageable, but as it is now it is insanely difficult.

Story-wise, I also had a sour taste in my mouth after finishing. Parry Nightmare takes place in Japan, and a lot of the protagonist girl's problems extend out of stresses common in the region (high workload, lack of personal time, shaky relationship with family), and though these issues are semi-universal, the problem presents itself in how the ending treats these traumas. Throughout the game, the girl makes it clear that she is deeply miserable on a base level to the point where she barely recognizes she has things she enjoys. She has little time to herself, her entire life commandeered and seen through what other people expect of her, down to the makeup brand she uses. Her mother makes her deeply unhappy and scared her as a child, her apartment is messy and fraught witn objects reminding her of stress. It is clear that if she continues living the way she is living, ignoring the messages from her body and mind, that she will get deeply sick, live a completely unsatisfying life, and probably die early. That's what I thought the game was leading up to- a wakeup call, time to make a change. Instead, the ending? "Your soul can overcome anything! Just keep pushing through!" And then it cuts to a cutscene where the girl is doing her work efficiently and talking to her mom on the phone, happily. So, what is it then? Was the moral of the story that everyone has things that stress them out, that the best thing we can ever hope to do is "push through them" instead of confronting why it is exactly that we dislike our parents, yet can't seem to admit it, why it is that we force ourselves to work so hard. Is the best we can ever hope to do is "push through" all of it? Is that healthy? There is a major contradiction in the game's messaging here. Though it seems like you're fighting off these traumas at first, it appears all you're capable of doing is subduing them until the next time they wring their ugly neck out in whatever form they take next. It felt icky, watching this person go back to a job they hate and a mother that has hurt them. I cant stand that ideology of "just deal with it" that has ruined many bodies and minds all at once.

So, it was interesting. Parry Nightmare feels good, solid. It's mostly the attitude it takes on the matter of stress that sours my opinion of it in general, as well as the difficulty. If you like short, challenging games then perhaps I would reccomend checking it out, just don't go taking life lessons from it.

I think Sam & Max are the most gay-coded characters ever created and I honestly could not tell you why. Maybe its the suit and the height difference.

Anyway, it boggles my mind just how effortlessly and hilariously witty this game is. I feel like a lot the time attempts at comedy through fourth wall breaks and quippy witicisms come off as really forced and groan-worthy, but Sam & Max are able to pull it off so well. Their dynamic, wordy banter, disregard for the law and morality, and gleefully cynical outlook on the world is just delightful and makes the humor really work. It's paired with absolutely sublime art direction and animation to boot. Sometimes the puzzles are fairly obtuse, but I think that's the price you have to pay with some of these older adventure games.

Every year since 2013, a French charitable event called "Desert Bus de l'espoir" (Desert Bus of hope) is held in order to receive donations for the Petit Prince association that finances dreams of children suffering from terminal illness. In 2022, over 70 609€ were collected.

While it would be easy to make fun of the "haha bus bad" game without taking into consideration the story behind its existence, I just really wanted to point out how something originally made as a piece of satire and novelty against the assumption that video games were too violent turned into such a symbol of support and empathy.

a bad story, badly told, experienced through the re-animated corpse of a video game that no longer exists. 2.0 doesn't have the dramatic and mythological death of 1.0, but as you run through silent zones all alone talking to absolutely no one, playing with skill trees balanced for an endgame four expansions away, you realise it is equally dead and gone.

mmos are social moments as much as they are video games, and the moment of time that was a realm reborn has long gone. to play it now is to simultaneously understand how a game that was heralded as the greatest redemption story in history is now seen as an albatross around ff14's neck. the half measures put in place to 'solve' this only highlight the problem more than solve it, as now it's quicker to get through, but the rhythm of the zones is absolutely killed as side quests are less than useless, the sense of space is obliterated, and the ratio of time spent watching awful cutscenes as opposed to playing the video game slides drastically in the wrong direction.

that said, the video game? is good! the world is beautiful and delightful to explore, the simplified rotations are still enjoyable and the faster levelling means you aren't taking too long between getting new skills. the lack of cross-class skills is a huge shame however and does feel like a piece of the game's soul is ripped out, the core identity of a job system streamlined away in the (probably justified) cause of endgame social convenience. but there is a joy to exploring eorzea and running dungeons that all the streamlining in the world can't kill.

the same cannot be said for the story, which is a car crash of multiple decisions made due to the reality of this game's nightmare development, that nonetheless conspire to ruin my life. cutscenes are stock animations and textboxes, so everything takes ten times too long and i can't button through fast enough. but the dialog itself has been localised by satan, so you have to slow down to read the most overwrought purple prose without tripping over it. the story is meant to be a tragic tale of struggle after a world ending calamity, but they're reusing all the assets from the last game so bahamut's casualty list is reduced to one old guy and every unnamed town NPC's entire family. it simultaneously wants to be a serious political study of navigating deep rooted conflict between nations and people, but it's also a cartoon for five year olds where the solution to every problem is "believing in hope" and you're the most special boy ever who has solved every problem look the president is here to throw you a party.

it does not work lmao. there are a few bright spots. i enjoyed a few job quests, specifically marauder and bard. rogue had a great little ending where it turned into lupin the third. the villains in gaius' tokusatsu squadron, inexplicably, all get more character work than any of the heroes despite having about two scenes each. this leads to hilarious situations where the most sympathetic characters in the game pour their heart out and make their tragic case while your guy doesn't react and silently murders them in the name of peace, because he is an mmo protagonist.

but aside from that i truly was dreading every cutscene. simply i am here to ride around on cloud's motorbike and do some damn tab targeting. and on that front it still delivers. there's even a few standout dungeons like aurum vale that has actual mechanics in the environment or the final bombastic praetorium assault. genuinely delightful moments, windows into oh right i fucking love final fantasy when the music is going off and there's an airship and also organization xiii is there for some reason.

so it is what it is. three stars. it's a video game. however mad and/or bored i got i was compelled to keep playing, because it is fun to hit a boss with DOTs. it is fun to pull like twenty guys into AOE range and feel immortal. please lower the teleport costs by the time i get to 7.0

Normally if I enjoy a game I'd either try to have fun with my writing and do something corny like roleplaying as a character or go insanely heavy on the showmanship, but for the sake of this I'm actually going to be really vanilla and bore everyone to death.

Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.

"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.

Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!

Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.

....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.

A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.