It took me a lot to get hooked because the actual meat of the game are the companions and I don't mean this in a "that's the best part" but rather almost the entirety of it and while I can guarantee one of them will be interesting, you can fuck yourself if the order you chose blindly doesn't end up being interesting for you but don't worry, you don't need to wait 100 hours for it to get good, just get the companions on your ship. After that, the companion missions + the rest of the story really is good.

My only complaint from this game is that the two companions that come from ME1 ended up being those that to me had the least interesting personalities in that game and while they're enjoyable here in ME2, I was interested in literally everyone else but those two but to be fair that allowed me to actually care for the other squadmates as I was trying my best to find one that I enjoyed and I gotta say, I don't know what they were cooking with Thane but that mf is incredible. I legit never got a crush on any male presenting character ever, this mf being the exception. I love you Thane but mass effect 2 doesn't let me be poly so I had to stick with Liara, and that's one of my issues with mass effect 2 aswell because it's not until the dlc that you get to do something with Liara if you had a relationship with her, and while it's great, it's not as much screentime as I needed to be satisfied which really left me thinking "grahh I really hope ME3 is worth it with the relationship content" (spoilers: it is, but I really wanted to see Thane stuff)

When Claire recommended me this game, I asked if it was a metroidvania and she went "ehh, kind of" and I feel like that's the best way to describe what blaster master zero is.
You get a big levels/areas like a metroidvania and you find multiple "dungeons" within those areas. Those dungeons are a top-down shooter and at the end of it you get a boss and an upgrade. It's a neat little thing that feels.. really great, actually. I enjoyed that mix of genres a lot.

Most of the game can easily be bypassed with the best weapon in the game that is really not that hard to get or lose, but all the other weapons are cool aswell because they interact with a lot of stuff, making it so everything is worth using atleast once.
The bosses are varied and interesting but sadly die too fast if you use the best weapon in the game (which there's no reason not to tbh) so please do your best to not stick with the best option unless you're struggling because the bosses are really fun to dodge and hit but most of those attacks can be easily missed unless you make it fair for the bosses lol

The game's story isn't as deep so there really isn't much to talk there, but the level design is actually quite clever. There's always a way to backtrack from the entrance of an area to the exit without much of a hassle and even without opening the map, it's kind of hard to get lost due to the level design being really good at showing you where to go even when it gives you multiple paths.

The true ending section was really cool and I wish this game had even more puzzles like the ones featured there so I'm looking forward to the next games in the series.

Audio is one of the most important parts of any horror game. Hell, I would argue that it is THE most important thing to do well when creating a horror game. When I heard this game was designed around voice proximity voice chat, I knew it was gonna be amazing but I wasn't ready for the absolute gem that this game's audio design has.

As soon as you enter a game, you'll notice how grotesque everything looks, sounds and feel. The UI showing your cracked helmet, the footsteps in your metal ship emphasizing how heavy your boots are, the way you "press the brakes" whenever you change to an opposite direction... all of these pieces get together and make you feel suffocated, dirty, and tired. This is how Lethal Company sets the tone and begins to make you uncomfortable in just a matter of seconds. This is the base level of comfort that the game will throw at you and it doesn't get safer than this and I love it.

After learning how the terminal works, you get to a moon and enter the facility, where the game actually starts. Monsters barely make a sound but they're all very distinguishable from eachother. Most of the time, you won't hear anything but the ambient noise. Filled with metal creaking, landmines beeping, or even fireplaces but.. try and think how any of those things I mentioned sound. Now make it crunchy and dry. That's every noise in this game. No sound sounds as you would expect it and if it does, it's 10 times worse than you imagined and I adore that.

Let's address the elephant in the room; Voice chat.
In this game, Voice Chat is so well done and optimized that if you're underwater, your voice will sound all "wobbly". If a monster is suffocating you, your voice will sound muffled. Fuck, if you inhale helium, your pitch will go higher too because this game is fucking amazing.
Your teammate's voice will bounce in the walls as you would expect it to happen IRL in a place like that. I have zero fucking idea how the developer did this, I am intrigued, fascinated and scared at how perfected this is.

Everything is so well done and achieved that when doing it with friends, you can't avoid but laugh and have a fun time and the developer is well aware of this.
While the amount of monsters and items are not a lot, they're all unique and memorable due to the way everything interacts with the player(s). If a spider kills someone, they will be wrapped in webs and left to dangle in its nest. Everything has a way to counter it and play around, making it always fun and unnerving to get into a new moon.

It's a game where you constantly adapt around it's circumstances. It's punishing, it's fun, and I can understand how it's "trial and error" nature can turn some people off, which is why this being a coop game is just perfect.

Pikmin 2 is a great game that I sadly didn't enjoy more than the previous game but the opposite.
One of the things I adored from Pikmin 1 was the puzzle aspect it had in how you approached the treasures, but 98% of Pikmin 2's puzzles only require you to have the right color/amount of pikmin and it's just not an approach I enjoy.
Pikmin 2 focuses a lot more on combat rather than exploration, with randomly generated dungeons that made such a personal little game feel.. synthetic.

The first game had this personal connection with the Pikmins where Olimar wrote daily about his thoughts. Talking about his family, fears, hopes and dreams... on the meantime, Pikmin 2 at the end of the day gives you an email from your family! But it's usually stuff like "waah waah there's a fly on my soup" and it's just so dissapointing. Thankfully there's the piklopedia for both enemies and treasures which really add up a lot to the game, but Pikmin 2 really just feels like a joke in comparison to the first game.

Speaking about jokes, in Pikmin 1 you could analyze the scenario first before entering into battle, meanwhile Pikmin 2 has events that will trigger if X happens. If the captain walks by, if a pikmin walks by, if a pikmin with a treasure walks by, and others related to digging and it's just so fucking annoying because you could of have cleared an entire level just so see a random bomb rock drop from the sky and kill your Pikmins. I don't mind deadly hazards, but when everything is randomly generated and the right way to play it is to start a cave, drop all pikmin and go with just one to do all triggers before playing it's just.. boring. To me, Pikmin was never about the combat so having a game that is dedicated to that it's just.. ugh

The bosses were really enjoyable and dangerous, the captain mechanic that incites you to multitask is great and the new pikmin types are adorable yet very useful. It made me really sad that Yellow pikmins cannot use bomb rocks anymore, but that's just a minor nitpick.

The main objective of the game is also incredibly dissapointing because it's just.. get money. There's no sense of progression like there was in Pikmin 1 and the main levels were just recycled from the first game. I don't care about recycling, but when the new content is randomly generated.... yeah....

I feel like Pikmin 2 is a game I will love once I played through them all because it's BIG like.. really big! and has the potential for "endless" fun that's also different, but if I'm fully honest, I felt let down when I played this.
I ended up beating it with a coop mod with a friend because I was pretty much about to quit and if it wasn't because of them, I don't think I would of have beated this game simply because I wasn't enjoying it enough.

Toem is so beautifully crafted that I booted it up and finished it within the same day (dlc included). It is incredibly rare for a game to catch me like this. It's heartwarming npcs, world, quests and mechanics filled my heart with joy and made me want to see more. From helping ghosts fulfill their last wishes to being a paparazzi, TOEM explores everything the world has to offer with one single mission: making you smile.

I love how silly but considerate this game can be. How cheesy and cute it can be and the ending, as predictable as it can be, it still managed to make me cry a lot because of everything it meant.

TOEM is an experience I hope everyone gets to play someday.

I've played a lot of metroidvania games in the past but I've never touched a metroid game. I always like to play series from their first entry to see where it all began and metroid was no exception. When doing this I expect gameplay to be clunky, annoying and/or outdated and while this is a remake, all it didn't change anything from the original game aside of graphics; it added stuff, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw how smooth this game is and how well it held up almost 20 years later.

The level design is incredibly good for its time to the point where I actually went "Oh wow! They subtly guided the player by doing this, that's pretty clever!". I struggled with some of the bosses and enemies due to a big amount of skill issue but I had a really fun time playing it! I finished it in 3 sessions alone with 90% completion because some of the collectibles are really painful to get ahahaha but it is amazing. It constantly defied my expectations and it made me fall in love with it.
Definitely one of my top 10 games I played this year (2023).