What a lovely romhack! This hack makes a full game out of the Spaceworld 97 demo of Gold and Silver, and it's so charming. Early generations of pokemon had a strangeness that has slowly been sanded out as the games kept going. By Scarlet and Violet, as much as I like those games, it's almost gone entirely. This hack is like an alternate universe where that weird energy kept going, and it made me feel like a kid playing through Gold on my game boy for the first time again.
The region of Nihon is full of oddball areas and concepts, so many surprises around every corner. How about a secret cave inside a fountain in Sanskrit town? How about a zoo? How about the entire Kanto region but shrunk down to the size of one huge map inside a city?
That's not even mentioning the pokemon differences. Some are completely unique to this version, like Raitora and Plux. Some would be revisited later, with early versions of Leafeon and Lickilicky and such. Some would be completely different versions of existing pokemon, like the poison type Umbreon and the infinitely cuter Hoppip line.
It's absolutely fascinating as someone who grew up with these games, and arguably a better balanced experience given it lacks Johto's obnoxious level problem. I don't think this will be my preferred way to play through Johto going forward, but I'll definitely be playing it again in the future.
Can't recommend it enough! I want Raitora in real pokemon goddammit!

Unfortunately the first "real" touhou game is a step down from the arkanoid-type game the first one was. All the ingredients of a standard touhou are here, good music, bad art, multiple gamemodes, stuff like that. The problem is ZUN clearly hadn't got their training wheels off when it came to shmup design. It's really simple stuff, enemies being hard to differentiate from the background. Sometimes enemies will spawn on the bottom side of the screen and just kill you instantly and you have to memorize where they spawn. Criticizing it is redundant because obviously it was learned from, and there's fun to be had here, but it's still not a good game with all those issues. Also the ending is completely incomprehensible.

I'm getting kind of tired of the itchio horror vignette games that make me want full games I know will never exist. You don't have to make 30 hour long slogs but the indie horror scene's increasing trend of 20 minute long games is spending ideas that could be fleshed out into long, great games into games like this. I don't mean to say short horror games are bad by any means, but the best short horror games still manage to play out everything in their arsenal. I don't care for Squirrel Stapler but at least it does everything it can do with its premise. VHS Paradise, like a lot of similar games I have and haven't reviewed from the itchio horror sphere, is a great idea not taken remotely far enough.

The DLC for powerwash sim has been largely a mixed bag. This one is.. fine? It's not as bad as the back to the future one. It's got 5 vehicles instead of the usual 3 vehicles and 3 locations, but the first and last one are proper 40K huge so it's not so bad. My problem is that they look like they're made of plastic, super bright and not very detailed. It's strange seeing this game drop the ball this hard on DLC. Warhammer powerwash sim should be the easiest recommend out of all the DLCs, it should have fuckhuge stuff to clean in ornate environments. Instead it feels like every paid DLC has been restricted to hell while the free ones are where the devs can actually have fun.

I think if you threw someone into Taiji who had never in their life played The Witness or heard of it, they would find it frustrating and boring. Conversely, if you have played The Witness, you'll spend your entire playtime wishing it was a better game.
The difference is where The Witness had very simple rules to all its puzzles, it held both a deceptively hidden secret game under its hood and layered its puzzles together for its more complex puzzles. It's not a spoiler to say that stars work by grouping two together in The Witness. Taiji, on the other hand, is only challenging in that figuring out the esoteric rules of its puzzle symbols is mind numbingly frustrating. Every puzzle type in Taiji has like 2 or 3 different rulesets that can change on a dime and you're just expected to interpret without any explanation. There were entire segments that I completed without knowing entirely how the puzzles actually worked. The entire art museum section is half reasonable and fun puzzles and half nonsense that, even after finding the solution, left me completely dumbfounded.
I think there are a lot more ways to criticize Taiji but worst thing it does is that it gives Johnathan Blow credit by comparison.

One of the weirdest story presentations I've ever seen. I can only imagine the nightmare this was to storyboard, and I imagine it's similar to the haze the game puts you in for the first 5 hours before you can really latch onto any plot threads. It's inventive, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't invested by the end, but two things drop it a bit lower than its similar modern VN peers like Somnium Files.
One, like I said, the game really asks a lot from you starting off. You just have to expect it to get better because it has a BAD first impression. It feels like absolute nonsense and were it not for friends' recommendations I doubt I'd have kept going.
Second: combat is bad. It's like 10% of the game so it barely matters but this combat system is really shit. It's hard to tell enemies apart, leveling up does barely anything, it's unbalanced as hell and this would ruin the game probably if it weren't also insanely easy. This results in, every 5 hours or so, having to play an hour of the combat missions while completely zoned out and effortlessly S ranking every mission.
By the end, though, I was having a great time. The presentation of the story really elevates the plot, picking up the ploy threads in an almost completely nonlinear order makes you feel a lot more invested. It demands you pay attention and, for the most part, rewards that well. It's great! Very easy recommend if you like weird VNs because it doesn't get much weirder.

I thought we were done with the touhou games made before Zun figured out what Touhou was going to be but lo and behold, touhou 3 is a weird split-screen vs shmup with mechanics reminiscent of puzzle game vs modes. Not a bad idea but the firing method absolutely kills it. Remember where you could just fire your bullets and it leveled up as you picked up stuff? Not anymore! Now you have to hold down the button and sometimes it doesn't go further than the second level and sometimes it goes to four and sometimes inbetween and sometimes it continually fires and sometimes it just doesn't for no discernable reason. It's abysmal.

The eternal end of life of tf2 has been something to see. I never played during its heyday but I played before it was the way it is now, probably about a year before the Pyro Update. Every now and then I pop my head back in and see it somehow even worse than how I left it. There are fan servers and TF2 classic, but it's not the same.
I guess the question is do I rate this as what I remember playing or what I play when I make the mistake of booting this back up. I remember a very solid and varied team shooter with tons of fun loadouts and a great game feel. When I play it nowadays I am reminded that Valve is too big to have to give a shit about anything anymore, get spinbotted by someone either spamming porn or something racist, and leave to go play on a community server that inevitably sneaks 1000 MLP playermodels into the server files. I think I'm gonna split it down the middle.
I don't think Valve will ever fix this game and I don't think Valve will ever shut it down outright. I also don't think the community will ever stop gassing this up as the gold standard for online multiplayer despite the game currently being a more depressing 2b2t.