finally, media that explores what it's really like to be Italian.

Pizza Tower diagnoses you with anxiety, and then demands you weaponize it against what causes you stress.

getting a P rank on any level feels like doing a foot-long line of coke.

hellsinker: hello! welcome to hellsinker. would you like to learn how to play?

me: sure!

hellsinker: alright, so first things first, this is a bullet hell shoot'em'up with three unique playable characters: DEADLIAR, FOSSIL MAIDEN, and MINOGAME, plus one unlockable character. hellsinker has a unique emphasis on strategy and problem solving with a special scoring system and different routes.

me: cool!

hellsinker: you have a weapon, which can charge, a subweapon, and a special move. there's also a slowdown button. you can combine and time these to do different special attacks. when youre holding down fire you'll also have a SUPPRESSION RADIUS around you where some enemy bullets slow down and you can even delete some! if you get close to an enemy, you can SEAL them, which stops them from firing.

me: got it!

hellsinker: on the left side of the screen, you're gonna see a bunch of HUD info. let's break it down. first, you can see how many lives you have left. you can also earn more lives. pretty self explanatory

me: right. so if i lose them all it's game over?

hellsinker: yeah. well no, you'll get a chance to continue. but it's not like a normal continue, you only get one and it changes the game significantly, and you can lock yourself out of a continue. anyway let's get back to the bars. next from the top is SOL. SOL determines the strength of your main shot but is also your DISCHARGE gauge, so you have to balance that. LUNA just below it determines how fast you fire.

me: alright

hellsinker: okay so next up is STELLA. the more STELLA you have, the more bullets enemies will fire. your score will also scale with STELLA. you can increase and decrease STELLA with item pickups, or by aggressive/defensive play respectively, that kind of stuff. you can acquire APPEASEMENT that will help you decrease your STELLA if you graze the requisite number thus spawning two OLD RELICS

me: hm

hellsinker: finally, TERRA starts at 240. you lose TERRA if you die, but also if you avoid LIFE CHIPS and stuff like that. oh, also, it goes down if you finish a level. if it hits zero, as the next segment, you'll be sent to the Shrine of Farewell

me: what

hellsinker: on the other side of the screen, we have at the top your autobomb status, which can be set to ASPIRANT, SOLIDSTATE, or ADEPT. as a reminder, your DISCHARGE and Subweapon will behave differently based on whether you're holding the fire button down, the state of your gauges, etc. after that, you have the Spirit score, one of the three separate scoring systems in hellsinker. it's represented by three bars which represent the base 10 decimal digit values of your Spirit score. you can get a BREAKTHROUGH at 5200 Spirit, unless youve triggered the other BREAKTHROUGH in Kills, in which case it takes 6200.

me: wait

hellsinker: there's also a Kill score, which can also trigger a BREAKTHROUGH at 2500 or 5000 kills. BREAKTHROUGH will reset the threshold of LIFE CHIPS necessary to earn an IMMORTALITY EXTEND (80+40n pts) and sets said bonus to 200. Below that is Token score, which is like the other two but has no BREAK, and is earned by collecting LUNA DROPLETS (which have inverted gravity mind you), which also slightly increases your LUNA, and DROPLETS increase in value arithmetically.

me: uh

hellsinker: okay, so remember TERRA? so the Shrine of Farewell is a bonus stage boss rush but you get infinite lives. STELLA is constantly rising. there are four bosses, and one extra. your Spirit score drops to zero though. oh, also, BOOTLEG GHOST doesnt work while you're here.

me: bootleg ghost????

hellsinker: because your Spirit score is reset (m=0) you're probably worried about your score, but don't worry, you get the chance to earn your Spirit back in the Shrine of Farewell by collecting Crystals. after this, TERRA is disabled for the rest of the run, so make sure to maximize your spirit-to-crystal ratio if you're chasing a Spirit based high-score route, but its also useful if you're going for survival. hard limit of segment 7

me: wait but

hellsinker: as i’m sure you inferred by now, along with executive fire, the primary engagement of HELLSINKER regardless of which GRAVEYARD EXECUTOR you’ve selected (and agnostic of MISTELTOE configuration) is one of: α) management of SOL (DISCHARGE when necessary), LUNA, and SUBWEAPON gauges by destruction, collection, and timing β) safely managing proximity between mutable projectiles while evading needletype and other immutables γ) proximity protocol beta applied to adversaries to reduce production of danger δ) judiciously balancing STELLA with RELICS and transubstantiation of mutables into STELLA, in order to synthesize needs for evasion and for Spirit/Kills ε) maximizing destruction (Kills), Spirit, and Token ζ) achieving IMMORTALITY EXTENDS through BREAKTHROUGH (5.2k(+1k)m || 2.5k(⋅2)d) and LIFE CHIP acquisition η) again, doing all this while evading and using the proper attack protocols contingent on your EXECUTOR and/or MISTELTOE θ) managing TERRA reducing actions in order to deploy the visit to the Shrine of Farewell strategically, such as to maximize Spirit (m) prior: 1 Crystal (i) = 0.5% m1, upper bound of n = 424i (disambiguation: non-summated) ergo maximal execution miΣ(n424) = 2.12 * pre-Shrine.

me:

hellsinker: alright! that just about covers the basics. ready to start playing?

me: i'm still working on the left side of the screen

There is a 30% chance that this game is enjoyable, but that percentage can be increased to 90% if the conditions are just right.

This review will be on the HD remake of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, but it will also encompass my experience with the original Wii version I played over a decade ago. My feelings about the one cannot be present without my feelings about the other.

I’m pretty sure 2011’s The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the first game I ever preordered with my own money (I still have the golden Wii remote that was packaged with it). A high school friend of mine and I would talk at exhaustive lengths about what we thought was going to happen in the game based off of the teaser art that was revealed featuring a swordless Twilight Princess-y looking Link standing back to back with a Wind Waker-y Great Fairy looking girl. The 3DS remake of Ocarina of Time had official art of Skyward Sword’s Link hidden throughout the world, which only further amplified my already bristling anticipation. Besides the previously mentioned remake of an already perfect game, Zelda had put out a few duds. It was time for a return to form. It was time for something with no strings attached. It was time for the classic Zelda experience.

And then I got the game.

Let it be known that there were some things I liked about Skyward Sword. Fi’s design, everything about Zelda herself, and of course Groose, stand out the most. The music is great as always and I like Kina the Pumpkin girl.

But those controls, man. For a game putting into practice what the Wii Motion Plus controller was capable of, it sure is a shame it never fully did exactly what I wanted to. It felt more like I was playing some carnival attraction.

I do not like them, Sam I Am.

Skyward Sword was kind of the last straw for me for a little while. In my petulant teenage eyes, The Legend of Zelda was no longer the proud sibling series to Mario, it was now the stupid gimmick series where they find new ways to play a game to justify their underpowered toyetic consoles to the world.

This opinion would of course change, but I still felt that way for a good few years. And regardless of which Zelda games came out afterwards, Skyward Sword was always my least favorite.

And then even more years passed. The game that was made to commemorate The Legend of Zelda’s 25th anniversary was ten years old. And to commemorate that, Nintendo released a high definition remake of the game, with the ability for buttons only controls.

Buttons only controls! I had to write it again just to feel the pleasure of putting it into words once more.

I got Skyward Sword HD at basically half price, and more than ever that feels like a steal. Buttons only mode elevates this game far, far above the original. It feels like I’m playing a video game! Every clumsy and misaligned action that Link could do before is now streamlined and precise. And they even give you the option to go back to motion controls and remind yourself how dire the situation was.

No longer is Skyward Sword a good Zelda game that is held back by how you interact with the world, it’s just a Zelda game now. And Buttons Only Mode actually makes that initial idea of intense sword combat Nintendo’s been chasing since Zelda 2 interesting to play! Sure, a lot of the combat has that shooting gallery feeling from the original where the enemy runs up to you and waits to be killed, but later on you fight more aggressive enemies that punish a missed input. And now that you have an interface that doesn’t miss an input half the time, it becomes an enjoyable challenge!

The world map is still small but without the Wii Motion Plus mosquito buzzing in my ear, I was able to understand that its constant reuse of the main three areas was a means of adding depth and richness to each of them, rather than laziness. I’d still like a snow area though. Or a beach area. Or both.

Skyward Sword HD taught me how to love again, and I, at the very least, really like Skyward Sword.

The ending is still kind of dumb. Spoiler alert for a 10 year old game but it retroactively makes my man Ganondorf feel less special. That’s some dumb shit.

I’ve played and 100%-ed The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword twice, once on each version, and I only recommend the second version. Button Only Mode is truly a game changer. Now, hopefully you will be as lucky as me and get this game for 20 bucks, but in the event that you won’t or haven’t, I still think it’s worth the marked retail price. It’s a good game with an endearing story with loveable characters, and now, interesting controls.

Fi is less annoying in the remake too.

Mega Man 7 had the potential to be the best entry in the whole franchise, by borrowing the best parts of X's formula, and combining them with the more simple structure of the classic gameplay. The more secret-oriented nature of 7 is by far the most obvious X influence, encouraging use of weapons to discover lots of new routes that'll lead you to optional upgrades. It also borrows a little from the Gameboy games, by carrying over the shop, where you can use your acquired currency for more goodies.

The visual aesthetic is wonderfully colorful - far more interesting to look at than what X has been doing imo - the music is on point, and every stage packs its own memorable setpieces, alongside bosses I really enjoyed fighting even without their weaknesses. The localization is the sort of charmingly put together trainwreck that you would expect out of a 90's SNES localization, turning the otherwise whatever dialogue into something a lot more incidentally funny and memorable. The ending also may be one of the rawest moments in this series's history, even if it's totally uncharacteristic in hindsight. All in all, the recipe for an all-time classic is all here, and more or less proves itself as one throughout.

Until you get to the final set of stages. Many things have already been said about this game's finale, so I doubt I have anything original to contribute here. But, when you read the wiki page and find out that they deliberately wanted to make the final boss unbeatable without an Energy Tank, it speaks volumes to the level of balancing that went on here, where they wanted you to tank through it rather than show any use of skill. It may be one of the worst bosses in Mega Man history, and I would honestly recommend at least placing a save state at the beginning of it, so you don't end up using up your E-tanks and weapon energy only to die 80% of the way through.

Mega Man 7 fucks with me, and it seems to fuck with a lot of others. You'd think it's one of the best games in the classic series, but all it takes is that one boss to suddenly convince you it's one of the worst. That's how bad 7's difficulty can be, but it's doubtful you'll see that at first. You'll have a really good time with this one. And then it'll sneak up on you. That one fuckin' bit.