A game by absolute freaks, for absolute freaks. If you don't lab kart racers everyday like they're fighting games and try your hardest to complete EVERYTHING in those games, this game is NOT for you.
Almost avant-garde in how little it cares for the casual kart racer audience, forcing you to complete an excruciating tutorial that can take between 30 minutes and 1 hour. To complete one grand prix before you can unlock multiplayer (or use a cheat code). To complete FIVE grand prixes before you can unlock the ability to use old SRB2kart MODS! (or use a cheat code). To stay with one color for your character unless you collect the others, and collect all 82 to unlock time trials. Never has there been a game so obsessed with making players master its mechanics before letting them play with others, as if they were preparing you for real-life war or something.

The game even opens slowly walking you through every option, unlocking each thing in the menu, everything contextualized with Tails and Eggman speaking to you, as Metal Sonic. Clearly, the devs tried to defeat Sonic Robo Blast 2's unnecessarily long intro cutscene, and in their quest for Genesis nostalgiawanking, they made the awful choice of only having the button prompts of the Genesis controller in menus and tutorials, not a huge issue in controller, it is on keyboard, especially because this game just has way too many mechanics and when you finally have to use an obscure one, you gotta press every key or go to the menu to check what key you assigned as the Y Genesis button.

Back to the tutorial, what did they think they were making here, Final Fantasy XVII?? It doesn't even explain things that clearly and there's so much dialogue, no option to reread, just once and trial and error.
It'd be one thing to make a kart racer with a lot of complex mechanics if they all feel cohesive and the races really push you to your limits, like Sonic Riders or even Bomberman Fantasy Race, but I don't think this is it when the mechanics are like 8 different types of boosts, one for each hazard, a charged melee attack? A parry? Two different types of roulettes that by default you have to stop manually???
A lot of this doesn't even come up in the races, it's for the single-player challenges, if it is in the race, you can also probably brute force it and use boost mechanic #54 instead of boost mechanic #301 as originally intended.

There's potential here, but it doesn't feel as good as SRB2kart to be honest. I gave up at the drift section in the tutorial cuz I just couldn't get it to work and the only drift you HAVE to do to proceed is the ultra charged one that gives you max boost #302! If the kart stops moving while you try to drift you instead initiate, you guessed it, another boost mechanic, one that has its own separate dedicated button so why make the drift worse by putting it on that button as well?

I usually don't rank games if I know that they're just not for me or if I played that little, but I don't see how the things I complain about would really do any good to any game in any genre, and even if all players use a save file with everything unlocked, I'll have to stand my ground unless they rework everything.

They tried to make a kart racer with more complex mechanics than Sonic Riders, and thought they had to have THE MOST mechanics to do that. They saw that some Riders players missed mechanics because of the lack of a tutorial and thought they had to overtutorialize EVERYTHING and demanded they mastered the game before even letting them race.
Don't think this will ever catch on and most will probably continue to just play SRB2kart.

I was kind of surprised how Into this game I got, but I guess it does make sense. Adult coloring books are super popular, right? Maybe I should look into those because hot damn it was fun messing around with this game. When I was a kid and I got a coloring book, I'd go kind of crazy with whatever colors I liked instead of the colors that, well, technically made sense, and I felt like it was fun to apply the same philosophy to each screen. The fact that you get four colors for each area helps things still look kind of nice even if you decide to color the tree trunks green and the leaves yellow, you know? I ended up kind of approaching each screen as a puzzle to the point where when you get to make your own pallet, I ended up not really using it all that much because I enjoyed working with the tools I was given.

I probably ended up making things a little boring once I got the fill tool, though.... but at the same time, it made sense to me. I liked the bright, fairly uniform colors, and the only thing that ended up really frustrating me about the whole thing was that it could be kind of difficult to differentiate different objects with both controller and mouse. Sometimes I couldn't figure out how to target a trunk to color and would just color the leaves... and damn, the "draw a thing" segments were uh. Well, I'm actually pretty proud of a Dragon Quest slime I drew. But the "recreate these paintings" segments looked goofy as hell.

But I feel like that's part of the point, isn't it? I'm sure there are people who have made some fantastic works of art in this game, but I think bringing a sort of amateur-ish vibe to the game feels like it vibes with the Themes. Pizza (or whatever your favorite food is, I ended up naming them Sushi lmao) just kind of picks up the brush to be Helpful and isn't really a professional or anything. The themes here are real good, man, whether you relate more strongly to Chicory or Pizza.

I... kind of did art when I was younger, but I got discouraged because I didn't think I was any good. There were people who told me I was good, but like. They were family. Was it actually any good? I don't know. It was pretty How To Draw Manga flavored. I think someone was Real with me and that kind of discouraged me out of it, but was it Real or Mean? I guess Art is just supposed to be, you know, fun and personal expression... I feel like the art classes in this game actually did a pretty alright job of getting that across, haha.

But you do kind of want to live up to the Legacy of the artists you admire, right? Even if that might not be for the best? There isn't something as crazy as a Chosen One who colors the entire world, but man. There's good themes here, is all I'm saying. I Did Cry at the end. Both the Art Themes and the Depression Themes were Very strong.

On the more, uh, gameplay-ish side, outside of Coloring there's a lot of puzzles around trying to figure out how to traverse the environment, with the more abilities you get making it easier to get where you want to go and making it possible to find Secrets. I found it really fun! There's a lot of puzzle elements that interact with the environment in fun ways, like colored surfaces that touch the water bleeding into it once you gain the ability to start coloring in water, and clouds that you can use to traverse raining color out if you color them in. It's cute!!!

There's no combat outside of boss fights, which are Buck Wild, man. They start out Kirby endboss in terms of flavor and get wilder from there. You can say the game doesn't quite prepare you for them but they ARE basically still traversal based, more or less... the ones I found kind of frustrating ended up being the mirroring ones. Fortunately, the game isn't Mean about them and gives you generous checkpoints even if you don't mess with the difficulty options.

Anyway, I think it's a whole lot of fun! Definitely a recommend from me, whether you're Big Into Art or not. The world it presents is also really fun, with a bunch of cool ideas that it doesn't dig TOO deeply into but presents you in a cute way. Lotta good minor NPCs. My favorite location is Feast, which may be a bit of a Nightmare Area for some but was a complete delight for me, an insect lover.

my friend naomi gave me crack for 99 cents. jesus christ.

Popcap is usually one of those companies where they kind of hit their boom early on and then everything after in the modern age is either Kinda Cool or an utter anti-consumer dumpsterfire
With change
Comes new solutions
Always
With change
Comes new problems

Insaniquarium is kinda like this

I was already versed in plants vs zombies, bejeweled and peggle games
But this kinda just EXISTED to me without me even havin tried it before and it is HELL.

Its fun
But its also hell
I think one thing I wish was really different about it was spicing up the tank gimmicks

You got about four different tanks with five different levels and a final boss to tie it off into a neat little bow
but really I think the fourth one is the only one that does it in a drastic way because its a lot easier to get run up on by monsters and have your fish snuft out when youre relying on Pregos(the like.. the birthing fish tht pump out the guppies)
and the money flow is slower

I like the tank with the starcatchers a lot too though! I think the game atleast is throwing enough aliens in rotation with enough Pet variety to keep it from getting BORING

despite this game not bein too terribly long, i wound up taking a couple breaks and finished it in like 3 playing sessions because my finger was getting tired from clicking. You use leftclick for fucking EVERYTHING in this game, to the point where i think it genuinely mightve been better to experience this as an app game or something. But im chillin.

final thoughts:
its war.
krillions will be devoured and need to be fed to reach the egg of power. an enthralling battle after battle in each tank you set fin in. you may click fast, Strong even, owllunchers. But they are beyond strength.
Death? It's meaningless.

my favorite pets were the clam, the mermaid and the shark
but s/o to Angie the MVP

that final boss goes hard asf

i was gonna hop on here and DOG ON this shit hard but then that started subsiding and i found myself retyping this because i was realizing.. i DID have some fun with this
Totally Spies is one of those shows where I remember really enjoying it despite not being able to tell you a damn thing about the show itself aside from the basic pitch, liking the whole cast and that people are Very Weird about these girls

I was stoked 2 see that there was actually a game that wasnt just a flash game or something on cartoon network...

...

and then it was more like.. a bunch! of cartoon network flashgames LMFAO

Minigame collection type shit usually has more of a tendency to suck especially when youre not a kid in a car ride riding the high off of your favorite show, but this is honestly so inoffensive at times i cant think of a moment where i was Truly Like "this game is complete shit"
cause some bits are Shit-TY but other times its chill
Like i enjoy the pseudo battletoads rope shit you do with Alex
the platforming bits with Clover are FINE
And uhhhh... I mean the puzzles are all so incredibly simple..
this is O K
for licensed games you can do a hell of a lot worse

it could be ONE shitty platformer
or ONE shitty abysmal spy game where everything is broken

instead its in the vibes of like
i enjoy the spy girls teaching videogame motor skills practically type shit

like i enjoyed this even if im way out of the age skill ceiling atp

Also i always thought it was fucking stupid how the girl in red is named Clover while the girl in green is named Sam
it made me think about if there was actually red four leaf clovers in the world and then i looked up if there was one on my dads shitty dinosaur dell computer when i was like 8 and there was no results n tht just made me saltier

Unlike the other pieces of Dragon Age DLC, which present linear storylines in self-contained levels, Awakening attempts to replicate the structure of the main game, bringing a larger campaign made up of different questlines that the player can choose to tackle in whichever order they wish. Also unlike the other DLC, it was priced at a whopping forty dollars on release, which was almost as much as the main game, so it might as well have had something special going to justify it. Fourteen years ago, my gut told me it wasn't going to. It turns out those suspicions were not entirely unfounded.

The expansion is a direct sequel to the events of the main game. The Warden, now promoted to Warden-Commander, arrives in the fortress of Vigil's Keep within the arling of Amaranthine, which was granted to the Grey Wardens during the epilogue. What should be mere routine quickly spirals into chaos as the fortress is attacked by an army of darkspawn whose commander is somehow capable of human speech. The Warden-Commander now shuffles to repair Vigil's Keep as well as recruit new Grey Wardens to fight this new threat.

From a playtime standpoint alone, the expansion already compares disfavorably, clocking in at a quarter of the playtime of the main game, which should be a sign of how light on content it is. While one might (fairly) object to hours-per-dollar being used to evaluate a game, it's important to note that runtime, in a dense RPG such as Dragon Age, allows the writers to flesh out their characters and worlds much better, and it turns out they desperately needed that, because Awakening lacks both the setups and the cast of the original and struggles to get its main quest going.

The mystery of intelligent darkspawn is an enticing one, and it does present us with two fascinating characters from that faction, but the campaign rushes through the moments where they might have been developed, and it is only near the very end of the campaign that we're presented with their true purposes and with the nature and scale of the threat they represent: until then, we're mostly tasked with the administration of the arling and recruitment of new Grey Wardens, doing quests that, while fun, at least at first, seem unrelated to the darkspawn.

Even though the work as arlessa is far from the dramatic race against the clock we had before, it's possible to tell fascinating character-driven stories against a bureaucratic backdrop, but not only does it require a wealth of in-game events -- which again, the short runtime does not allow for -- strong characters with good chemistry are needed, and Awakening is lacking in the latter, and arguably the former as well.

Apart from Oghren, who has somehow become even more vile since Origins, the party is composed of entirely new characters, and it's a real mixed bag. Justice is the one standout, a spirit from the Fade trapped in the body of a Grey Warden against this will who's then forced to experience the world of mortals through the eyes of one. His points of view on the events of the game are fascinating and fresh, and his lack of knowledge about the real world organically creates conflicts of ideas with the rest of the party without him having to be a dick to them. Justice also experiences consistent growth throughout the game.

The rest are just... eh. Velanna and Sigurh are forgettable: there could have been something going for them, but at the breakneck pace of Awakening, there just wasn't enough time to flesh out their characters and they just end up as More Grey Wardens™. Likewise, Nathaniel is an interesting proposition for a character that needed more time to work out his conflicts with the Human Noble without seeming whiny -- my first impulse, which I had to reload a save to fix, was to execute him on the first meeting when he asked to be killed instead of conscripted.

Finally, Anders: his DA2 incarnation may not garner all the love in the world, but at least there, there's a better balance between the multiple facets of his character, and he displays a wider range of emotions. In Awakening, he spends most of his time playing the smartass, to a point where leaving him in the party for too long may drive one insane. It's interesting to see the inversion that will happen in DA2, where Justice will be the one that reads as shallow and single-minded, while Anders is more complex.

Either way, another point of the setting that gets lost due to the rushed storyline is the weight to the order of the Grey Wardens and their practices. The Right of Conscription gets waved around like it's nothing, and the Joining ritual loses both its mystery and seriousness, becoming as casual as inviting someone out for a darkspawn-flavored milkshake. The pacing also ruins points that Awakening itself tries to bring up, with lots of quests petering out before reaching a fulfilling conclusion. A few sidequests, like the Blight Orfans (sic) questline, make for great examples of this, but nothing can top the abysmal conclusion to the campaign, which sees the party turn their back to the charred corpse of the final boss immediately as it dies and... cuts straight to the ending slideshow.

The cherry on top are the bugs. Origins is far from a clean gaming experience and a trip down the wiki will quickly demonstrate that, but Awakening is on a whole other level: multiple pieces of equipment can be lost upon entering the DLC and entire questlines can just fall apart or be missed if the player dares do missions in certain orders or remove companions from the party when the game doesn't expect them to. By the end of my playthrough, three entire questlines were uncompletable, including Sigurh's character missions and the Vigil's Keep upgrades. And supposedly, even with the game done, its bugs are still with me, as the imported save can have other issues and misrepresent the playthrough.

There's a semblance of something good going on in Awakening, but engaging with it mostly brings disappointment over disappointment. In the end, it feels like a tacked-on, overpriced expansion to Dragon Age: Origins, lacking both the scale and weight of that game. Owners of the Ultimate Edition will enjoy one more silly adventure to take their Grey Warden on if they can tolerate the hurdles, but will probably forget about it shortly after. As for the people who paid full-price back in the day... Oof.