one of the most viscerally unsatisfying and frustrating games i've ever played, Sonic the Secret Rings feels like it should have just been a tech demo that got shelved. disregarding its narrative, level design, enemies, bosses, art, music, etc. Secret Rings is just unfathomably broken. Sonic's core appeal is movement - going fast and eating ass - but Secret Ring's delayed, inaccurate motion controls are not a functional replacement for a regular-ass controller. there's no point getting into its other elements (they aren't good either) because you can't engage with them without the pitiful little Wii controller struggling to make any actual inputs happen or even make Sonic slothfully slide a couple centimetres to the right.

i got this game for christmas as a kid with a Wii and Mario Galaxy. i played this game before Galaxy and had a 'oh no did i ask for something stupid and waste my parent's money' moment of extreme guilt and i probably only played this for like 20 minutes before quitting and feeling like i committed some grand sin. was my first Sonic game, too.

also MAKE BELIEFS REBORN
QUESTION ALL THAT SNOW

Like if Blood came out after The Matrix. You're a badass coolguy who's the special cursed one in a long trench coat with a cool hat and steel boots, you've got guns that double as melee weapons, there's a morality system that can give you chain lightning, you have to fuck this one evil goth lady in an on-screen sex scene, and yes - you can double jump. Darkwatch is the kind of decent game with some neat ideas and fun design that people who made red and black MLP OCs who's special talent was bleeding would think is sick as fuck. and they'd be right.

Everhood has a lot of soul, a lot of creativity and talent and it is undeniably an interesting game with some incredible ideas. sadly, i'll probably remember it as a game with incredible ideas instead of an incredible game.

the core game is fresh and exciting, i loved the way it would add onto itself and evolve throughout. i love how the rhythm section twists to involve combat. one-off gimmicks like the racing, the cool visual tricks, the D&D bit. new encounters are exciting if only just to see what it'll add. i wanna stress how great the visuals are again, the way it plays with the camera itself and its psychedelic backgrounds rule. unfortunately every fucking location is just a black void with some scattered tiles and the world and environments of Everhood are thoroughly uninteresting.

i think Everhood's biggest failing is its writing. Everhood spends NO time establishing anything or anyone, none of the characters have introductions or lives or unique voices. not literal voices but why do the little gnome guy and the trucker slime boys talk so eloquently. to experience the story is experience an endless barrage of wacky one-note characters, some of which are fun, but none of them are developed in meaningful ways or feel important. i didn't care about anyone, which felt really weird when it came to the latter half of the narrative. it felt like the game expected me to get attached without doing any of the work to show me why i should like its characters. its larger thematic ideas are interesting but when the foundation of the story is so weak i didn't really care. it's like if Undertale's only character was Froggit a few dozen times over.

the most rancid, accursed odor a game has ever had. memories of a time when boys in your grade would laugh at Smosh videos and fight over yogurt tubes. of when eminem was the mainstream face of rap. a time where tobuscus was a guy who made epic parody songs and wasn't a guy who sexually assaulted people and melted his brain on drugs and conservative tweets. when pizza hut was fine dining. fruit gushers shared in humid computer classrooms. a time of pixar DVDs your mom's friend's husband burnt. a time of accursed rituals n goosebumps books n shit. just rancid.

now that we've gotten some distance from its final update, i think Smash Ultimate was ultimately a disappointment for me. years of updates later and the netcode is still hogshit, the balance is all over the place, and i feel like the game never changed or evolved meaningfully outside a few busted character additions. DLC roster was a major letdown personally, they got really homogenous and didn't have many interesting fighters. of the 11 DLC picks, only 2 of them aren't from an RPG or fighting game and of those is the guy from minecraft. combined with the lack of online infrastructure during a global pandemic, the lack of quality single player content (spirits and the WoL are stinky dawg), and the huge gaps in playability between characters there wasn't much of a reason to really return to this. it has a ton of content but i believe its roster size impeded it from really making meaningful updates, tons of fighters are basically unplayable above a casual setting and some characters feel incredibly overtuned in comparison. when there's like 80 dudes, it's hard to really give them all the attention they need and so many characters here remained practically untouched throughout its life. i respect the dev team and Sakurai all a lot but i'm not huge on this one. i did cry when they put Banjo in it, tho.

installing flesh augmentations to mine biocoins by drilling hundreds of holes into your teeth and filling the holes with Walmart™'s Biomass Filler®. getting hired to use your skullgun on the owner of a ski resort by his children. extremely pornographic ultra hyper suck and fucks. grapple with your appendix. the CEO mindset. stripping the organs from the residents of suburbanite households to sell on the stock market. the 640x480 resolution gifted to us by God. mass-produced sex slaves bred to serve their corporate overlords who can only scream and be fucked. teeth with teeth with teeth, take a bite.

tiring. written and directed by a zionist stooge inspired by how he wanted to make Palestinians suffer watching videos of IDF soldiers getting their asses beat. the game part isn't anything special this time either - third person shooting, x to melee cutscene, light crafting elements, and hours of sections where you walk slowly and characters talk at you while you hold forward - it's legally a video game. no aspect here is used for any creative or characteristic benefit of the medium, this game is begging and pleading to be a TV show. it's very serious, so it can't be very interesting mechanically. the focus here is the story - a story that, were it not in a game, probably wouldn't receive the acclaim it has. there's a very misguided attempt to show the "two sides" of its conflict and it does this by making you retread the same beats of the other already way too overly-long story again, but its central conflict is dull unless you liked the boring dad guy from the first game. i do commend the games industry for finally making a revenge story about a deadbeat dad who's a girldad Horny 4 Revenge (until she isn't) this time but i really don't think that story needed to be TWENTY-FIVE (25) hours long! any sense of impact this could've had is lost in the indeterminable sludge of its pace, especially when the gameplay is so basic. it's a story you've seen before if you've ever once watched/read a dreary post-apocalypse story where the author's idea of humanity is only seen through the lens of exhaustive, immature brutality. unironically positions killing children as a good thing in case they grow up to be terrorists mad at you, which i thought was just "morally grey" stuff but this was created by a zionist so it's likely sincere. it gets to a level i find campy in the same way that really dorky batman vs superman movie was. when it's trying to be serious it's showing you how effed up and twisted humanity and VIOLENCE are by making you kill a dog and then showing a flashback of that dog being happy. this is not serious, like what are we even doing here. people with jobs will watch and enjoy the TV show version but won't remember it after eight months. despite what critics said about it, it's certainly no 'We Love Katamari' (2005)