Well, this is it. This is fucking it. Nintendo not only perfected the BotW formula with a much fuller world and significantly more structures to explore, but they expanded to both the skies and the depths below, basically tripling the amount of space to fully explore. Shrines are much less vague and better designed, and the new mechanics using Link's new hand all tie in expertly to BotW's core idea of a fully open sandbox to explore. Amazing new story content as well. I will continue to play this, but so far this is fucking peak.

(also Monolithsoft was involved with development, that alone makes it 3x more peak)

Honestly...a fantastic game. I'll admit it has some problems, like unnecessary repetition that almost made me give up on the game, and some lack of variety in Shades, but what got me through was the story. The story as a whole is amazingly written, focusing extremely heavily on the bond between a young Yonah and her brother, and diving heavily into the other two party members and their own struggles. I'll...admit I cried at every ending. The game is flawed, sure, but in the end...it's art.

Now, on to Automata.

OK, I tried to give this one a chance. I put a good few hours into trying to learn the gameplay. I don't like being harsh on things, and I tried my absolute hardest to go in with an open mind.

But my GOD, this game is putrid.

The soundtrack slaps, yes. The presentation is good, and the low-poly environments and models have a ton of charm. But that's ALL I can say that's positive. The gameplay, which is the core of a racing game by the way, is fucking HORRIBLE. You barely have any control over yourself, the player's momentum is somehow both super stiff and super slippery, and turning barely fucking works, forcing you to jerk yourself into a super wide turn well before you actually get to that point on the track, almost always leading to overshooting and going off the track. Oh, and speaking of the tracks, they're WAY too thin for a racing game. They're just barely wide enough for four people, let alone however many NPCs the game plans on throwing on the track later on. There's constant sharp turns in crowded flooring, and going off for even two seconds can completely ruin a run and put you 3 places below.

You think this is a traditional racing game so far, right? NOPE. The tracks are littered with collectibles and gates, which are required to collect to unlock new tracks and characters. You have to memorize where these are, meet their requirements and collect them, ALL while ensuring you stay in first place, because if you aren't then the current race doesn't count. It's an actual fucking mess.

As a longtime Sonic fan who played a ton of what are considered the "worst" in the series... Yeah, I even enjoyed Sonic 06 more than this one. There's SO many better racing games, even from and before the time this released, so I just have to ask...why? How did you screw up an established concept this badly? This now sits alongside Sonic 4 as one of the only Sonic games I will never be returning to.

Well, that was definitely the first Pikmin. Quite a good game at that, but it also has some glaring issues, mainly in AI and collision detection, that make it clear this is an older game. As for the Wii controls, they work super well; the Wii Remote pointer works perfectly for aiming, and you use the Nunchuk to move Olimar separately to the cursor. The D-Pad and Z are used for camera control, D-Pad Down arranges your Pikmin in a line based on where the cursor is, B calls Pikmin and C dismisses them, and A is used to throw the closest Pikmin to you. Native widescreen is added in, and the Ui is upscaled and rearranged to fit it. Overall, yeah, a good port of a good game.

I will preface this by saying, I have barely any prior experience with Spider-Man material, although I am familiar with Spider-Man himself. I've watched three of the film adaptations, but that's about it.

THAT SAID, this is about the best they could have done with a Spider-Man game. Superhero games have heavy shoes to fill, in making the player feel like a superhero, not just play as one; this game achieves that excellently. The core gameplay is a great mix of movement, allowing the player to scale buildings and swing through NYC at extremely high speeds; combat, using a huge arsenal of attacks that perfectly complements Spider-Man's abilities and generally feels super satisfying; and a slew of side quests of different scales that make it feel like there's always something that needs to be done, adding to the immersion of playing a superhero with constant threats of various scale to deal with. While possibly a controversial take, I really liked the smaller "crimes" randomly appearing across the city, as it adds to the aforementioned immersion of constantly being busy helping citizens.

Besides gameplay, a major part of the game is its story, a completely original tale taking heavy influence from past Marvel works. The story skips past the backstory and cuts to a more matured Peter Parker, who has been working as Spider-Man for the past eight years and has a good grasp of his abilities. This is a great move on the writers' part, allowing a focus on the surrounding city rather than Peter's internal learning curve, something I thought was too much of a focus in some other Marvel-related media. The general story is a 20-hour interactive Spider-Man film, having heavy cinematics but generally putting its focus into gameplay, a smart move for a game like this.

So yeah, I'm overall happy with this game. I'll definitely go back and play the older console Spider-Man games, but this was absolutely a good place to get back into the IP, and I look forward to trying out the upcoming sequels.