I've been meaning to play Sunshine for maybe like the last decade or something, and here I am, finally having done it. I am whelmed.

All in all, I definitely liked it. The defining mechanic here is FLUDD, which is really fun to use in all its forms. And I'd say the movement in this game is very smooth. Isle Delfino is also a really beautiful setting that I greatly enjoyed exploring. Mario has never really had a miss with 3D platformers, and I'd definitely extend that to Sunshine, but I dunno. It didn't blow me away or anything.

Unfortunately I have a lot of complaints, lol. First of which being that a lot of missions felt very long, particularly in the early game. Certain shines felt like they took 20 minutes each to get, which would be fine in more moderation, but like damn, there were a ton and they felt SLOW. And there's definitely a fair share of insanely annoying levels (sand bird, pachinko, lily pads, chucksters, melon festival, all of Corona Mountain) to deal with as well. Most games just have one or two really infamous areas, but somehow Sunshine manages six, which is just obscene. Corona Mountain in particular was a pretty disappointing final level. The majority of it is just navigating with the boat that controls like piss, followed by a really anticlimactic final boss. Also why does Bowser sound like that.

Blue Coins are a huge aspect as well, and I largely didn't mind them. They were pretty fun to collect during an initial run through a world, less so when I had to go back and get all the ones I missed. Some of these were hidden in honestly ridiculous spots that I would've never found on my own, like how was I ever supposed to think "oh yeah let me just shoot water at the moon in the sky in Pianta Village"??? They are optional at the end of the day so you can just ignore them if they're not your thing, but I'm bad at leaving games unfinished for the most part, so I suffered through.

Sunshine frankly has a lot of really glaring issues, but not so much that I think it's a bad game. I love the aesthetic, the soundtrack is incredibly good, and outside of the sections that everyone knows are terrible, it's very consistently fun. Plus, in the instances where it gives an actually fair challenge, like a lot of the secret levels, I'm super down with it. I had a great time, but I can definitely understand now why it's a bit of a black sheep among the other 3D Marios.

"Surely it shouldn't be too hard to just win all the 100cc cups in this game, right?" - Guy Who Doesn't Know That He's About To Have A Really Miserable Time

I thought that Super Mario Kart might be fun to give a try just for the novelty of seeing where the series started, but like, holy shit. This game SUCKS. As an old SNES game without too much content, it seems like something you could pick up and probably finish in a day if you wanted. I didn't find that to be the case, though, and I have a whole laundry list of reasons why.

The most immediately obvious issue here is that the controls are really, really bad. I did get mostly used to them towards the end, but that doesn't make them not awful. It takes an unbelievably small amount of input to accidentally hit a wall or catapult yourself off the track, whether you're drifting or just driving normally. And for a game where turning is so difficult, it sure loves 90 degree angles. Based on what character you're playing the handling changes, but let's be honest, it doesn't matter. I tried every character at one point or another and the difference was barely notable when you consider how little control you have anyway. It's an instant barrier to entry, and if you do manage to get past it, what's on the other end still isn't even worth the effort.

The CPUs in this game are Billy Mitchell level cheaters. They do not play by the same rules as you whatsoever. They have infinite items that they can throw at you as much as they like. They completely bypass most obstacles. They have the ability to just do a fucking 10-foot vertical leap over bananas and shells lying around, or even ones you are in the process of throwing at them. It's seriously relentless and not fun at all to deal with.

Graphically the game looks nice enough, but it's a racing game on the SNES and so it's really hard to see what's in front of you at times. Which is not helped by the map taking up the entire bottom half of the screen. The track designs are also generally really bland and reused over and over. There are 20, but it ends up feeling like way less due to how similar they all are. There are also walls and obstacles on some tracks that are for some reason part of the floor, so it looks like you'd be able to drive over them, but no, they're barriers. The ice blocks in the Vanilla Lake levels even blend in with the floor just to make things that much more annoying.

Some of the mechanics are also just insane to me. There are coins you can pick up to give yourself a small speed boost, but you lose one literally EVERY time someone bumps into you. And if you get bumped into when you have no coins, you spin out. It's horrible. And every kind of "recovery" period in this game after spinning out or falling in a hole takes so long that it's basically a death sentence. Getting punished pretty hard for getting hit is something standard for Mario Kart to this day, but it's just completely unreasonable in this one. All these issues compounded made beating the Star and Special cups in particular feel like torture.

I really don't have much of anything good to say about Super Mario Kart, other than that the music is good. That's it. It's probably more fun with a friend, but like, just play a good Mario Kart game instead at that point. I put 17 single-player hours into this (because I'm really stubborn), which is probably an amount you should never reach unless you're a speedrunner or were actually playing it in the '90s with your little brother or something. I can appreciate it for building the foundation of the series, but there's essentially no reason to play it today.

I picked this up from a humble bundle, and I'm pretty glad it was included because otherwise I don't think I would've ever even heard about this game. It definitely flew under the radar a bit which is a shame because I think it's really good.

I wasn't sure what to expect from Astalon, all I really knew was that it's an NES-style metroidvania. The start of the game was kinda slow, but I feel like that's a pretty frequent problem within the genre so I won't hold that against it too much. Having three characters to play with (and later 5) is pretty cool. They all have different weapons and attributes that make them feel unique. I can only think of two downsides, first is that swapping between them requires a lot of backtracking in the beginning, but that issue basically goes away entirely once you find the item that lets you switch on the fly. The other is that in my opinion Zeek doesn't really fill any role particularly well and is almost completely outclassed by Bram (who is the most hilariously blatant Simon Belmont copy I've ever seen by the way). Beyond that though the main three you start with are all great.

The game is pretty hard honestly. There are really few ways to restore health so I died a lot. I do think that's fine though because dying is not very punishing at all. There are a lot of warps to get back to where you need to be and it's also the main way to get to the upgrades store. Sometimes I just have a lot of orbs and hit the lowtiergod "I should kill myself NOW". For real though it's a pretty cool mechanic that takes away a lot of the sting of dying since you can always buy some stuff and come back stronger.

I did 100% the main game and for the most part it wasn't too bad. There were definitely points where I got so lost that I had to look up a guide though. Arguably a skill issue but whatever. The only part of it I really disliked was finding the few rooms I never entered which was a huge pain considering how big the map is (plus it's required to get the good ending). And farming orbs is absolutely mandatory for getting every shop upgrade. But if you don't care about those then you'll be fine.

Once you beat the game there are three other modes you can play - boss rush, and two extra campaigns as new characters. I didn't really mess with the last two since they seem to just be playing the whole thing again which I'm not really interested in doing right now lol. I did do boss rush though and I feel like it sucked. When you go into these fights you are nowhere near as strong as you'd be in the main game which makes it pretty miserable. For the average player I feel like it's pointless to even try it without getting Blood Chalice right away since it's the only reliable form of healing, but this also results in the fights taking ages because of how much time you need to spend turtling waiting to get some HP back. I wouldn't recommend bothering with it. Also I'm trying really hard not to let it affect my rating too much because it is the last thing I played before deciding I was finished lmao.

Anyway to get to the point, it's not a perfect game, but I had really a great time and would for sure recommend it to anybody who's into metroidvanias.