The Noise is a fun character design wise because he's designed to be objectively better than Peppino in pretty much every way but to get to that point takes a lot of technical mastery of the character's moveset and it comes with a really engaging learning curve. At the beginning, Noise's limitations were just as apparent as his strengths over Peppino; but once you understand the scope of his moveset and start to do some of the wackier shit it enables that's when the fun really begins.

Ultimately, The Noise Update is just an excuse to play more Pizza Tower. The additional tweaks to the game when playing as Noise are a lot of fun, especially how the game handles the boss battles. The new music tracks where they pop up are fantastic and in line with the base game's OST quality, and the reward you unlock when beating the game is really neat. All in all, pizza tower a good game would put another 20 hours into P ranking all the levels again.

The crash series starts off with a real mixed bag. For the positives, level design is great on the whole with a lot of fun platforming challenges and there's a lot of fun experimentation which lead to a lot of infamous levels whose concepts understandably weren't brought over to the sequels (foggy bridge, slippery climb/sunset vista-esque vertical levels). The design philosophy of being a 2d game at heart makes it an unique experience for its time and even now, and makes it easier to go back to when compared to other more traditional 3d platformers where you're dealing with early attempts at camera controls and the like. The game also does the whole DKC gimmick of how the levels get less natural and more sinister as you progress, but I think it might work better here? The game has some fun spots where you go up a waterfall in a basic river level called Up The Creek so you can fight Ripper Roo whose fight takes place at the top of a waterfall, and then there's the last island that has all the factory/lab levels and that gives you the Cortex Power -> Toxic Waste -> Pinstripe sequence of levels which is fun thematically.

The problems arise with general gameplay polish and a lot of small issues that permeate through the game. A shitty gameplay quirk is that when you walk and spin you keep your forward momentum even after you stop holding forward as you spin which can result in a lot of annoying fuck ups in a game that can be punishing when shooting for 100%. Speaking of 100%, in order to get the special gems needed for max completion, you have to beat the level while breaking all the boxes without dying. The problem with the no death requirement is it doesn't feel designed to be that way. It feels like they ran out of time to implement a box tracking feature so when you die all the boxes are just respawned in and if you do die you're just not brought to the "Great! But you missed" screen. Bonus rounds are also bad in this game because outside of getting a gem completing a bonus round is the only way you can save the game. You can't retry a bonus round if you fail it outside of restarting a level which means you'll rarely actually give a shit about them. Reloading a save also resets your life count to the default four which makes it really annoying when you're deep into the game and you need to go back to an earlier level to get some lives for some of the harder end game levels. Most of this obnoxious shit is why it took me until now to 100% the game outside of NST and even then I used emulation saving to keep my life count and I also gave myself save states at the beginning of the Cortex key bonus round because fuck that. Overall, it's Pretty Good and has a lot of good things going for it but the annoying shit bothers me a lot and brings it down to just being Good.

It's been five years since the first game came out and after a while sometimes you need to play a game again to reassess your thoughts on it. I instantly remembered why I loved this shit the minute I started swinging, and it didn't take long to re-acclimate to the game's movement and combat. No real thoughts on ol' Miles outside of that, it's more of the thing I love and it's a good time to be had by all. Only real complaint I have is that the NG+ playthrough was a bit annoying because of all the game's cutscenes and cinematics you can only skip a select few of them to the point where I barely understand why the feature was added in the first place.

Super Mario Wonder is not just a pretty great 2D platfomer, but for me it was a good source of personal validation. I've never gelled with many aspects of 2D Mario, gave NSMBU a shot on multiple occasions and just bounced off immediately, and also the specific 2D Mario mechanics made me indifferent at best to 3D World and made it actively dislike 3D Land. So when this game was announced I didn't pay it any mind really, thinking it'd be the same ol' shit they've been making for the better part of thirty years.

Well the game leaked a week early and I pirated it for a laugh, and wouldn't you know it? They drastically changed the Mario formula, and in doing so addressed the many things I've never liked. They've removed the incredibly dated timer and score mechanics (apologies to all mario score attackers out there)! Lives are still present but in Tropical Freeze fashion they can be purchased in the in game shops for little cost. The four power-ups in the game are specifically for offense and puzzle utility, while the more important movement abilities are handled through the badge system, which means even if you're tiny baby character on death's door, you can still preform your glide or whatever. A far cry from something like 3D Land where having and losing the tanuki suit is basically playing a different game. Most importantly, there's even a badge that let's your character swim! In a straight line! Mario Wonder on the bleeding edge of major innovations in 2d platforming here!

Besides that base control is what you'd expect out of Mario. Presentation is obviously aces and you'll play it baffled that they stuck to the New aesthetic for so long. Level design is good on the whole, the Wonder Flower stuff is kind of a less repetitive version of Triple Deluxe's super power gimmick, while being inventive and fun. Difficulty is on the lighter end which isn't surprising but the game can bear it's fangs when it wants to, and there's a specific part of one of the end game levels that's the shittiest designed thing I've ever played so the devs can eat my ass with the ever-jumpy fire stick shit. Sneaking in a complaint here, the Bowser Jr fights are nothing to the point where some worlds don't even bother ending with one, the final boss is solid at least. Ultimately, despite sailing the seven seas for this game I'll be buying it when I can to fuck with the online features and play with friends hopefully.

I don't know amigos I loaded an eight year old save state because my ass was five chapters away from ending the game and I farted through it. Due to this elongated time period between play sessions and my desire to skip cutscenes I can't tell you what happened in this shit outside of the lengthy cutscene that played as Anakin Skywalker and Kelik (killer spelled backwards) shared a tender moment with the final boss dork I triangle attack'd twice into sweet oblivion. That cutscene may have been unskippable but because of ye olde holding space on visualboyadvance I could see the endless dialogue scroll in hyperspeed while my eyes glazed over waiting to see how hard I fed Lirin. What a moment in time not just for the fire emblem romhack community, but for every Hulkamaniac (have fun with my family and friends).

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is largely what you'd expect from a Jet Set Radio spiritual successor in the year of our lord 2023. It looks the part, it sounds the part, and it plays the part pretty well.

The game really adheres to how Jet Set Radio plays, the movement and existing mechanics here are pretty much identical to the ol' Dreamcast game. The main thing that separates the two games is how BRC addresses the things people didn't like about Jet Set Radio. Jet Set has a pretty notorious difficulty curve with a lot of stuff that can prove annoying and this game sought to address most of those things. Movement on your locomotion of choice is basically 1:1 with Jet Set but with the ability to get off your wheels and walk, the air dash and the Tony Hawk manual mechanic it's a lot easier to come to grips with and start chaining tricks to start boosting around with impunity.

The big stuff though is with the graffiti and police mechanics. The original Jet Set tasked you with spraying graffiti and to do so you needed to do a lot of quarter and half circles while local authorities bum rushed your ass in real time ready to whack and shoot you. In BRC, graffiti has been greatly simplified while also stopping time for a rather generous period allowing you to spray your preferred graffiti design without worrying about the authorities.

The police, meanwhile, are now attached to a GTA style heat system that grows as you paint graffiti everywhere and escalates as you make your way through the game. Your ne'er-do-well painting can attract the police on the scale of normal mooks to sticks all the way to copters and mechs. The game has a combat system to help you out in defending yourself from the over-militarized police force and while the combat is rudimentary it's also very funny. Doing jump cancels that AoE launch a bunch of dudes into your graffiti finisher is very fun, and enemies and machines having whatever graffiti you sprayed plastered on to them is very endearing. I wouldn't say the combat is anything great but it gets the job done in a way that's positive for the game.

So yeah game's good. The soundtrack is aces, with the 2mello and Hideki tracks being obvious standouts when playing, you can hold your phone out the entire time playing the game (millenial/gen z simulator confirmed?!?) and you can unlock a shitload of characters with even more available in the post-game. They just have to populate the hideout with all of them and let you switch between them outside of dance floors in the game's other areas.

today is alright for tonight
playin' funny game and feelin' alright
alright for 2nite

Just a neat little metroidvania focused on the use and abuse of certain movement techniques you'll earn as the game progresses. Doing long jumps into super side hops into wall runs and wall kicks flows and feels good and when mastered can lead to naturally finding alternative means of solving platforming bits. Besides that, the PS1 low-poly aesthetic has yet to be beaten to death so it's neat here and the combat doesn't really have any reason to exist outside of the movement enhancing ground pound and a C tier end boss. Overall, good use of eight dollars and eighty cents (Canadian currency).

The days of the licensed movie tie in game are long dead, but the days of completely random, absolutely psychotic licensed games are here with Scrat as a shining example. A truly baffling platformer, Scrat just fuckin runs through random places without a care in the world in order to get nuts so he can nut. One of the greatest things about the game is that sometimes Scrat needs to pick up key nuts to progress through locked doors, and unlike every other platformer where picking shit up hinders your abilities and makes you slow as shit, Scrat runs at the same speed AND you have access to all your movement shit. So yeah if you want to shovel pure jank shit into your mouth it would not be a mistake to shovel Scrat's nuts into your mouth.

Honky: stark railing mad is a standard turn based rpg gacha skinnerbox propped up by good presentation and graphics. The character upgrading is too easy to get lost in the weeds in (why must everything have the ability to level up? why do fucking relics even exist?!) and pulling for fuckin light cones in the gacha is somehow worse than pulling for 3* gobshite year one characters in Fire Emblem Heroes in current year. But yeah I'm bored and brain is broken so I just buy the shitty battle pass and daily free shit for a month pass as I autobattle through 90% of the content with little issue.

Obviously the big draw of this thing has been the level creator where you can fuck around and make 2D levels similar to Crash 4 flashback tape levels, but the game itself outside of that is also pretty good for a small project. Controls are an honest recreation of the second game's movement but they aren't quite there. The 3D levels themselves are neat and do some fun things; while the 2D Uka Uka time trial levels can get cheeky, especially the last one. Overall pretty good not bad pretty good pret-tay... prettay good.

A neat demake that addressed the two big issues I had with the 3DS game. Namely the map design, where most of the egregiously designed maps are changed to be less bad. It's not all roses on this front but some of the maps of the 3DS game were extraordinarily terrible and there's less of that here. Another big peeve I had with the original release was the glaring lack of supports for most characters, which is addressed in spades here. Characters like Kliff, Silque, Sonya and Leon now have more than one support option and the made up supports for the game are written pretty well.

On top of that, the general spritework is great. The character portraits are excellent and the small touches like the little animation flourishes when entering combat don't go unnoticed. Brushing up against the limitations are fun, there's no equipment slot so having shield and ring bonuses is pretty good. Sadly there's no combat arts so you can't Hunter's Volley with impunity but magic works the same. Requirements for getting warp are still easy so you can do plenty of horseshit with it. Dungeons are replaced with tower of valni esque maps where you promote by visiting Mila statues and gain stats by visiting wells on the map in combat. Definitely worth a play through if you like SoV and want to fuck around with GBA mechanics.

Papa's Freezeria provides the experience of a retail wage slave job from the comfort of you own home, minus the mental abuse you'd suffer from the customers and your coworkers alike. You'll spend the first hour or two learning the ropes, you'll get a few hours out of chasing stickers, and then you'll slowly realize the gameplay loop (7 customers a day! closers on a set loop! one amigo orders the special! [two with the board]) hasn't changed from maybe the third in game week so you largely go through the motions until you get full completion or quit. As someone who's currently unemployed, it was a fun enough time waster that scratched an itch and now I'm done with it probably forever.

Just a nice, stupid thing for a stupid holiday that's sometimes nice.

This review contains spoilers

You know what the true Fire Emblem™ experience is?

You take the character that's insecure about their frailty and lack of physical strength
You baby the shit out of them because Citrinne is the best character and deserves blatant favouritism
You take them to the final chapter
You perform the engage+ function, giving them some buffs and access to the Dragon's Fist weapon
You have her walk up to the giant cobra dragon god boss, and you have her punch the shit out of it and end the game with her critically One Inch Punching the final boss to death.

Now THAT is the true Fire Emblem™ experience.