Gotta say, I'm a bit surprised by all the mixed reviews I've been seeing. Penny's Big Breakaway has been my most anticipated game this year, so I had some pretty lofty expectations, especially considering who was working on it. Thankfully, I think it really lived up to them, and I've been having an absolute blast with the game.

The movement is very momentum-based, focused around using your yo-yo tricks in succession to gain and maintain your speed. It's got a bit of a difficulty curve to it. Like in a Sonic game, you're probably gonna screw up a lot in the first world or so, but with time, there's such a strong sense of flow to navigating through these stages. You have so much freedom of expression, to the point where there's rarely one way to make it past an obstacle. You can swing to carefully position your jump, dash to keep the speed up, land on your yo-yo to keep your combo going, or chain them all together and maybe even skip a few platforms. It's so good, and the level design feels meticulously crafted to encourage you to go fast.

But beyond the core gameplay, PBB is just so fun. The visuals are bright and colorful, and each world has such unique and fresh theming, like an Italian-style restaraunt set in a volcano or a library floating in an endless void in space. The animation for Penny is so lively and expressive, the NPCs are so charmingly written, and I shouldn't have to say that the soundtrack by Tee Lopes and Sean Bialo goes incredibly hard. Outside The Eidophusikon is already a solid candidate for best vgm track of the year.

PBB isn't without its jank, but as a fan of 3D platformers from the early 2000s, it scratches an itch I haven't been able to scratch since probably A Hat In Time? In a lot of ways, it feels like this game was made for me.

TotK is to Super Mario Galaxy 2 as BotW is to Super Mario Galaxy, and not entirely in a good way. TotK may technically be stronger on a gameplay level, with its great Ultrahand and Fuse mechanics and more fleshed-out questlines, but it's nowhere near as cohesive thematically.

Everything about Breath Of The Wild created a sense of isolation and discovery. The map was filled with hidden secrets and memorable landmarks, NPCs were sparse with some even turning out to be disguised Yiga, the difficulty curve is steep at first, the Shrines looked so alien and unique, and the abundance of flashbacks worked for a story about the ruins of a kingdom long since destroyed. There's a vibe to BotW that really resonated with me that TotK just doesn't hit.

Despite Ganon being promoted heavily these last few weeks, I was surprised to realize that I thought less about him than I did when I was playing BotW. He seemed like such a constant threat in that game, but between your more powerful moveset, the increased number of NPCs, and the fact that your home base is right next to Hyrule Castle makes him seem less intimidating somehow. I remember how excited I was for TotK to be the "darker sequel" ala Majora's Mask but I feel it's more light-hearted than BotW was.

The sense of discovery isn't there either, with not even the new areas being as exciting to explore. The sky is sparse, the depths are barren, and the caves are repetitive, and the rest of the game is re-exploring a map I've already invested 100+ hours into completing. TotK is a great sandbox game, it throws you into a massive world and lets you do whatever the hell you want, but because of that it lacks the sense of adventure that BotW tried so hard to emphasize.

Once again, TotK is still a really good game but it feels like there's something missing here that all of these extra gameplay elements are unable to fill. Breath Of The Wild feels like it had a vision, everything in that game felt purposeful. Tears Of The Kingdom, on the other hand, just feels like it ever so slightly disrupts the balance its predecessor struck so perfectly, and feels like a lesser game for it.

The lowly console owner that I am, I spent two years waiting to be able to play the sequel to one of my favorite games of all time. After all that, there's no way it could actually live up to the lofty expectations I had set for it, right?

Right?

Yeah, Freedom Planet 2 is freaking incredible, it's wild how much it blows its predecessor out of the water in terms of polish and scope. If FP1 was in my Top 20 favorite games, then FP2 is a Top 10, maybe even a Top 5. It pretty much checks every single box in terms of what I want from a game. Complex and fluid movement, satisfying combat with a high skill ceiling, level design that's consistently fun and inventive, bombastic boss fights, loads of side content, adorable character designs, an engaging character-driven story (seriously it's way better this time), utterly gorgeous and cartoonishly colorful visuals, and an incredible soundtrack. It elevates Freedom Planet from a lovely homage to the Genesis era to an all-timer platformer series that can stand on its own alongside some of my favorites in the genre.

I made the mistake of playing this version over the originals. I enjoyed it well enough, but something just felt off about it. I couldn't vibe with it as much as some of my other favorite platformers. It felt even weirder when I played Crash 4 and loved it way more only to find people saying the original trilogy was still better.

Then I actually played the original PS1 versions and, yeah, this remake was kinda botched? The original games's controls felt so snappy and fast, the hitboxes were mostly on-point, spin-attack enemies was a breeze, and I never had any issues with jumping. In the N Sane Trilogy, the controls are so slow it feels like I'm moving through molasses, I hardly ever feel confident in my jumps, the massive character models make stages feel constrictive, the enemy hitboxes are inconsistent and often way too large, and I spent the entire game in constant fear of dying just out of nowhere. No wonder newcomers who started with the remake thought the games didn't age well, because this version feels way worse and less consistent to play!

Sure, the N-Sane Trilogy adds some QOL improvements, especially for the first game's save system, and it's always nice to play as Coco, but I'd take the game actually playing well over a bit of quality of life in a heartbeat.

If you were underwhelmed with Chameleon Twist, I highly recommend checking out the Japanese version because it fixes so many of the worldwide version's issues. It's slightly harder (especially the Boss Rush), boasts some extra minigames and collectibles, adds a secret boss, lets you play the Battle Mode against CPUs, and even gives you a secret code for beating the game damage-less. The main campaign is still brief, but the game has a lot more meat on its bones and overall feels more complete.

I genuinely love Chameleon Twist. It may be short but its core concept is still so fresh and allows for some truly creative and memorable stages. There's so much charm in the visuals and music, the JP version has so many modes and secrets, and the game is even super encouraging towards speedrunning and high level play. It's a crying shame most people who've played this one are only familiar with what's essentially the beta.

Literally a bootleg. Midway took the sprites, engine, and even some of the level design from Shin'en's surprisingly solid EU-exclusive Maya The Bee games, stripped out all of the animation, made the controls worse, and dropped Manfred Linzner's great GAX music, just to sell an inferior product to America in the hopes of capitalizing off The Bee Movie. And on top of that, Midway released it on the DS too with zero changes, and it still looks worse than Shin'en's work on the GBA?

This game is so weird. I don't even care about Maya The Bee, but Shin'en deserved better than this, man.

As someone who's played a bit of the OG SRB2 Kart but wasn't an avid player, I had no idea how I would feel about Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers. Frankly, I didn't even know I was gonna be able to play it but as it turns out there's a Mac port. If anything, that gets props from me. I'm seeing a lot of very polarized reviews on here, either 1s or 5s, but I don't think I've ever played more of a 2.5 Star game in my life.

Ring Racers can be best described as maximalist in every way, it does so much, too much even. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The presentation just exudes that Sega Saturn vibe, it's polished to a glowing sheen and looks incredible the whole way through. The song selection is a mix of original tracks and existing remixes and it's immaculate, special mention goes to that Tokyo Active NEETs cameo in the first cup. There's a lot of mechanics and a decent amount of them are fun, even if only in theory. Putting Advance 2's mid-air tricks into a racing game? A ring-based resource management system? There's some neat stuff here. There's also a lot of content, over 200 tracks reportedly, and the ones I've played so far are pretty solid and densely-packed with secret areas and branching paths. With how many unlockables there are, I could definitely see myself coming to Ring Racers every once in a while just to chip away at them.

That being said, for every good idea, moment of brilliance, or genuinely great element, Ring Racers also comes with a lot of bullshit. I know SRB2Kart already kinda felt like bumper cars at times, but man does the pacing of races in this game feel really start-and-stop a lot of the time. It either feels like you're moving too slowly or too fast with little in-between. There are so many mechanics that none of them have any room to breath. Half the stuff you learn in the tutorial are barely used, at least in the early game, and several functions being tied to the same button can make it very easy to misinput. And some of the mechanics are just baffling, why would you add a spin dash, which requires the player to stop in place, to a racing game? Speaking of the tutorial, I'm not the first to say it's way too long and overindulgent, and even after it, there's still a ridiculous amount of insignificant nuances the game never teaches you. Some of the tutorial missions could actually have been fun in a separate challenge mode, but not as a wall barring you from the rest of the game. So much of Ring Racers is locked behind doing other tasks, which feels like such a step-back compared to how SRB2 Kart was so easy to immediately jump into even when you just start playing.

I don't think Ring Racers is bad, it's an obvious labor of love, an impressive technical achievement, and has a decent amount going for it. But I wouldn't say it's good either, it's way too overstuffed and has too much holding it back. For any other fan developers working on a passion project, or really just developers in general, PLEASE try to be mindful of feature creep. Sometimes, it really is better to go simple than let your project balloon into an ginormous mess of good ideas.