There it is! Great dungeon designs and puzzles.This is exactly why i love the zelda games.The 3D design makes the dungeons much more interesting to explore.I also find the wall merge mechanic to be one of the best in the zelda series.New items were fun to use and the gameplay is near perfect! This is also the only zelda where i was kinda hooked with the mini games lol.

Now which one did i enjoy playing more? This one or its prequel? As my first played zelda,and for nostalgia reasons,i will still choose A Link To The Past over this one. But i do think this is the definitive zelda experience. It takes everything from its predecessor and does it even better. Also worth mentioning,I do think A Link Between Worlds has the best story out of all the zelda games.Its nothing too crazy but does feel more engaging than the other zelda games.Both og fans and people new to the series will like this game.

Gameplay and visuals considered,I really think The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is the best 2D zelda to exist as of 2024.

I reviewed this game with a key provided by the publisher.

About four years ago, I was winding down my first playthrough of Skyrim on PC and was hunting around Nexus Mods for well-rated new questlines. At the top of the list was The Forgotten City, a significant new expansion with rave reviews. I downloaded it and dove into the hole in the ground to visit the cavernous world below. Inside, I found an underground ghost town full of petrified people and a time portal back to the past. Diary entries told me of the Golden Rule, a curse placed on the city. If one person committed a single sin, the entire city would pay the price.

This mod became one of the most popular story expansions of Skyrim, beating out the thousands available on Nexus. Although I didn't finish it back then, I had a great time diving into the mystery of the Forgotten City. I was beyond intrigued when I saw the same modders formed a genuine studio, Modern Storyteller, and created a brand new narrative adventure game based on the mod. I'm pleased to report that this small team of four developers has delivered - sort of.

The player begins by exploring ruins when suddenly they're washed down a river and saved by an explorer. This explorer begs them to find a friend of hers who went missing down a well in the ruins. The player agrees to dive in and proceeds to the Forgotten City. Traveling through time backward roughly 2,000 years, the player finds themself in a huge but brightly lit underground cavern thousands of feet below the surface. 22 Romans are trapped in the tiny Forgotten City with the player.

Through the friendly, Roman tutorial character Galerius and the Magistrate Sentius, the player learns the rules of this world. A mantra called the Golden Rule reigns over the city: "The many shall suffer for the sins of the one." Hundreds of Romans who failed the challenge, now petrified into gold statues, fill the streets. Magistrate Sentius commands that no one will sin, lest the curse turn them to gold. As you know, people can only last without lying, cheating, stealing, or killing for so long. The main quest is to assist Sentius in finding who broke the Golden Rule, condemning them all to death, and then stop them by looping back in time.

The world of The Forgotten City is gorgeous. There's some excellent lighting work that leads to a very directed and controlled atmosphere, and the textures are beautiful. My RTX 2060 Super was overheating, running it at 1440p 60 FPS on ultra graphics, but knocking it down to high graphics settings was a great compromise.

The world is relatively small, so it's not too hard to track down specific characters. Gameplay consists of navigating branching dialogue trees, gaining new information from investigating or talking to other people, and using that information to open up new dialogue paths. The dialogue system is almost identical to DONTNOD's action-adventure narrative Vampyr, and I mean that as a great compliment.

You'll traverse the city, find items, clues, information, do quests, and plan out your next loop. There is very little combat, though there is one dungeon where your player wields a somewhat wonky bow and arrow. When anyone (including your player character) breaks the Golden Rule by sinning, the gold statues awaken. They raise golden bows sent by the goddess Diana and begin to turn everyone in the city into gold statues. Your player can escape back into the Shrine of Proserpina, the goddess of rebirth, and enter a time warp that sends them back to the start with their items intact. It is impossible not to draw a parallel to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The greater narrative cannot progress without repeatedly looping, changing things at least a bit each time, and learning a bit more.

My first complaint is that, especially at the beginning of the game, many logic chains are broken. When I first spoke to Sentius, he affirmed my status as a time traveler, but a few sentences later, he didn't believe me when I mentioned I was from the future. I experienced several more instances of this in the first hour. With characters being so angry, they would never speak to me again one moment and then amiable and charming the next once I clicked a dialogue option. Characters would forget information I just told them seconds ago. Logic chains in the dialogue are the entire game of The Forgotten City. It was a bad first impression for a game so focused on speaking.

When this concept works, it is brilliant. I had a half dozen moments of euphoria playing The Forgotten City as my mind clicked the puzzle blocks into place. I found myself rushing down the street to the next task, knowing exactly what to do and being rewarded with simply being correct. I swear I had a Jimmy Neutron Brainblast at one point. Many of the quests feel incomprehensible when you first glance at them but have obvious solutions in retrospect. After the first hour or so, I didn't run into any breaks in the logic chain and began to have fun solving the interpersonal puzzles.

The fleshed-out, three-dimensional characters didn't do much to help me care about their fates. Yet, not caring about them didn't stop me from enjoying prying information and secrets out of them. There was a moment where a character offered me a way out of the city in exchange for a lot of cash, and I remembered not to agree because her equivalent character had successfully duped me back in the Skyrim version.

This leads me to my second negative point: The Forgotten City contains some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard in a video game. I have played through several dozen quest mods for both Skyrim and the Fallout games, and the volunteer voice actors for those mods have been better than the performances here. I was astounded that the developers were comfortable putting the game out like this. Additionally, it sounded as though most of the actors were recording on low-quality microphones. Some voices were much louder than others, and I could hear certain characters like Sentius with their mouth pressed against the mic. On top of the subpar acting abilities of the cast, there was no consistency to accents. Most had a British accent, although they were Roman, except the one Greek character who had a very prominent Greek accent.

The sound mixing was unacceptable. The music was quiet in the overworld, got louder when someone was speaking as if to cover up their words, and then when climactic moments hit and the orchestral sounds swept in, the music got even quieter. The voice reciting the Golden Rule was so loud that my speakers began to shake, even turning my volume down to 1. I was constantly turning the volume up and down to set the levels right, and it never got better. Almost all my issues with the Forgotten City are sound-related, but the audio and voice work here is so shoddy it has nearly ruined the entire game.

Despite this, the gameplay of The Forgotten City works almost too well. I would see this game more as a proof-of-concept than anything. This style of narrative adventure mystery can work, and when it does work, it's ingenious. Tremendous audio and voice issues, many minor bugs, and clunky movement hold The Forgotten City back from being truly great. In the future, with the injection of a larger budget, Modern Storyteller could produce a masterpiece in this fashion. As of now, I recommend this game to all interested parties, if only to see that this kind of high-concept narrative adventure thriller is not only possible but inevitable.

My rarest achievement was reaching an ending without looping a single time. Only 3% of players got that achievement.

This was shocking to me, because the very first thing I did once I learned the core concept of the game was shoot the leader guy in the face to see what would happen.

Now, assuming a good chunk of those 3% actually played the game well and got a more substantial ending instead of goofing around like I did, how few gamers turned on the game, picked the Gun Guy option, and blew away Diet Caesar? 2 percent? Less than 1? Does that say something about me, about people in general, or both?

...anyhow lol get rekt Sentius

The original Disney Infinity game just barely qualified for inclusion in my plan to play every Pixar game since the starter pack came with a level based on Monsters University.
So, if that's the case, why am I playing 3.0? and why have I skipped 2.0?

3.0 contains two Play Set packs based on Pixar movies that don't have official video games, 2015's Inside Out and 2016's Finding Dory, which I'm playing in this playthrough instead of waiting until I've seen the film because I plan on playing Rush: A Disney Pixar Adventure, which I'll talk about when I play that.
While it is true that adding these two packs could possibly open me up to playing other "DLC" based on Pixar movies that don't otherwise have official games, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it..

I've also skipped 2.0 since that's entirely based on Marvel, although to appease the part of my brain that'll nag me about it, I've decided to play 2.0 pretty soon anyway.

3.0's official Starter Pack comes with a Play Set based on the Star Wars prequel trilogy (or, I guess The Clone Wars TV show since Ashoka is here). Since the game came with this set, I'll be playing this first.
It plays a lot like the original game, but it's a lot bigger (although that could be attributed to the fact that this whole playset is one story instead of three like the last one). I do like that each planet has its own collectables list, that makes it easier to get them.

The Star Wars playset is actually a lot of fun. A short, open world Star Wars game where every planet has only a small amount of collectables makes this like a smaller, self-contained LEGO® Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, and if the other two playsets (based on the original trilogy and the sequel) are like this I might actually consider picking them up.

The second of the three I own for this game is based on Inside Out, and is the main reason I bought this game.
It's a pretty boring 2.5D platformer that gives me LittleBigPlanet vibes (maybe it was developed by Sumo Digital). Getting all the collectables in this is surprisingly hard on a first run through and the game doesn't really give me much incentive to go back to this (I much prefer the open worlds).
I couldn't actually complete it since I didn't figure out exactly how the final level of it worked, and losing a round makes you redo the entire level from the beginning.

I wasn't really interested in the playset and I don't really have an incentive to continue, so I decided to just ditch it.

The Toy Box stuff is honestly a hell of a lot worse than the original game - the hub world feels a lot emptier, the Toy Box Adventures are incredibly confusing, and a lot of the feats require you to buy additional characters for next to no reward.

A cool addition to this game is the fact that progress on characters is saved - this means that because my figures are pre-owned, I'm a higher level and the skill trees are mostly complete without my input, but other than that little, interesting detail I think the only reason you should pick this game up are the Star Wars playsets and the excuse to buy the figures since now they actually do something.

There's no other reason to pick this up over the original, at least not since 2017 since the online servers are dead. You can't get 100%, or anywhere close anymore since not only are a handful of trophies unobtainable but there are also two playsets that came with trophies.

One of these two is Finding Dory, which I own. I'd like to get the other one, based on Marvel, since it's developed by United Front Games (they did Sleeping Dogs), but it's expensive for some reason.
Dory is a pretty simple and quite short game that's actually pretty fun to get 100% on.
It has a similar vibe to the Inside Out pack, but instead of being an irritatingly monotonous 2D platformer, it's a fun one.
You play as Dory, and you're collecting lost fish and putting them at home in a reef.

This means that between levels, instead of having a match-3 game or a generic menu, you get an open world to add buildings to and do mini missions in.
This is what Disney Infinity should be, and I hope 2.0 is the same.

This game is unbearable and boring as F. Its pretty interesting how I can give it 1 star while people think this is the best thing ever. I don't want to waste anytime writing anymore or waste any brain cells on this game. I gave it a fair shot and made it half way through act 3 and I just could not take it anymore. The music was nice as is the animation....there is just a bunch of random chat and text that scrolls by. I had 0 investment in it... i don't know what the point of this game is... is it a commentary on society? If so do i really need a game to tell me that our medical insurance is a rip off? I tried to push through because its an easy trophy... however i cannot take 8-10 hours of this just for an easy plat.

If you like reading a lot of random things (kind of like in some animes random shit just happens, and people say and do random things, that don't connect and you just accept it....) play this game. If you like traditional story telling... stay far away. In contrast i loved Limbo, little nightmares, etc.... i was expecting more of the same here based on what i read going in....

Trading guns for magic, you play as one of the special few who can wield all three colours of the arcane. You are armed with Blue (a Rifle), Red (a Shotgun), and Green (a Machine Gun) to mow down your foes. The writing is fun, and the voice acting is good. Although, you might struggle to find a character you actually like, as they are all different shades of asshole. The game claims you can build your character to fit your playstyle, focusing on powering up one colour or evenly spreading your points across all three. However, it then throws you encounters that require specific colours to defeat enemies, spitting in the face of those claims. Sometimes, a game can simply be "good". They don't have to all be masterpieces.

Ah. That’s more like it.

As the one person I know who likes Donkey Kong Country, Drill Dozer, and that one burrowing escape sequence from Ori and the Will of the Wisps, I knew Pepper Grinder was going to be right up my alley. What impressed me though, was just how precisely the game melded its influences into something that felt simultaneously fresh yet familiar. The level design is classic obstacle escalation (introduce a concept, scale it up, throw in a twist, and then run the player through a final exam into their victory lap) with DKC inspired secrets with skull coin collectibles for unlocking secret levels. Many of the usual formula beats are present as well to force execution tests, from the usual moving parts in the forms of cannons, rope swings, and grappling points, to constantly present sources of danger like the freezing ocean or the temporary dirt patches created from cooling lava. What sets Pepper Grinder apart however, is that the terrain itself is the main obstacle. It feels like such a natural pairing to seamlessly mesh environmental navigation with the course’s very foundation, and the best moments of the game lean into funneling the player through various layers of shifting and isolated terrain while tearing through all that may stand in their way.

That said, I think to really understand the nuances of Pepper Grinder, one has to readily commit to its time attack mode. I could have been sold on the game-feel alone as an amalgam of Donkey Kong Country’s momentum physics and Drill Dozer’s force feedback, but playing under circumstances that force you to squeeze every possible second out of the timer gives the player a better appreciation of its movement mechanics. Pepper is not very fast on foot, nor can she naturally jump very far. Therefore, you’d think that most speed comes from tunneling through terrain, but it’s not quite that either. Rather, the player has to maintain momentum through the interplay of drilling and jumping by exiting terrain via the drill run (boosting right as you’re about to leave a patch of dirt), which commits the player to the projected arc leaving the terrain but with the reward of significantly more speed. The result is some of the weightiest and most satisfying movement I have ever experienced in any platformer. I was constantly figuring out new ways to save seconds by timing by boosts both within terrain and right before exiting terrain (since you can’t just spam boost and using it too early can lock you out from getting the necessary boost jump out of terrain), skipping certain obstacles entirely with well-placed drill runs, and figuring out how to manage my health to bypass unfavorable cycles and damage boost past mines and thorns. Some of those gold time attack medals were tight ordeals, but I absolutely savored every moment of the grind.

Bosses as a whole are a significant improvement from the usual quality of those in Donkey Kong Country. You’re not safe just waiting above ground, and burrowing to dodge attacks forces you to at least dash-dance underground since drilling means you can’t stay in one place. As a result, the player is constantly on the move, and you’re incentivized to do so anyways given that most of the bosses require multiple hits to defeat and aren’t the usual “invincible until they’re done attacking” crop from DKC. The biggest complaint I can levy here is that boss hit/hurtboxes can feel imprecise; I’ve heard that many players have had difficulty figuring out how to correctly drill into the beetle boss’s underbelly, and while I had no issues there, I did die a few times from the skeleton king’s heel hitbox where there was no visible attack in its vicinity. Still, I much prefer these boss fights over many of its peers, and figuring out when and how to best aim drill runs from the ground to speedrun bosses was just as much of a pleasure as speedrunning the courses themselves.

There are a few questionable design choices that could be touched upon here. Firstly, there’s a shop system present where you can purchase optional stickers from a gacha machine as well as temporary health boosts. The former is mostly forgivable given that they don’t impact the gameplay otherwise and can be cleared in about three minutes of purchasing and opening capsules. That said, I feel as if the latter could be removed entirely given that I never felt pressured to purchase insurance for courses and bosses, especially because I was often taking hits anyways to skip past obstacles and because you’re not going to regain the extra health capacity in-level once it’s gone. Secondly, bosses in time-attack mode force you to watch their opening unskippable cutscenes before getting to the action, and this gets extremely irritating when you’re constantly restarting fights to get better times. Finally, Pepper Grinder has a few gimmick areas in the forms of a couple of robot platforming segments, two snowmobile sections where you just hold forward on the control stick, and a couple of run-and-gun levels with little drilling involved. I can look past most of these given that they don’t take up much time and that I enjoyed all the minecart levels from DKC as is, though I do wish that they spaced the gimmicks apart a bit more given that levels 4-3 and 4-4 both have significant run and gun segments sending each course off.

If I did have any lasting complaints, it would be that I just want more of this game. Most players will finish adventure mode in under four hours. That said, even despite a lack of polish here and there, I absolutely adore Pepper Grinder. At this time of writing, I’ve 100%ed the game and even gone back to a few time trials after snagging all the gold medals just to further polish my records. It’s often difficult for me to pin down what makes a game feel good to play, but in this case, I just know. Pepper Grinder feels like an adrenaline rush made just for me, and though its execution barriers and short length will likely make this a tough sell for many, it is undoubtably some of the most fun I have had with a game this year. If you’re curious or enjoy anything that I’ve discussed in this write-up, please give the demo a shot. They don’t make 2D platformers like this anymore, and Pepper Grinder’s existence leaves me wondering why when they absolutely killed it on their first try.

Yakuza 5 is an anthology series.

Episode 1 - Kazuma Kiryu
“Suicidal Pedestrian Kart”
————————————————
The citizens of Nagasugai are desperate to die! It is your job to thwart the morbid plans of the populace while lawfully delivering your passengers!


Episode 2 - Taiga Saejima
“Cabela’s Dangerous Hunts: Sapporo Edition feat. Weapon Distribution Santa”
————————————————
Eat tripe, learn what a Marten is, and giggle every time Saejima says “Baba-chan”!


Episode 3 - Haruka Sawamura
“Harukatsune Miku”
————————————————
Sing and dance as you learn to stand up for yourself, but also repeat things back to authority figures verbatim and follow countless instructions without any error or deviation of any kind!


Episode 4 - Shun Akiyama
“Inept Businessman Simulator: Osaka Expansion”
————————————————
Spend very little time establishing a new office because there’s so much DANCING and KICKING to do!


Episode 5 - Tatsuo Shinada
“Brothel Baseball Chocobo Racer”
————————————————
Whack balls, race chickens, and write smut to get out of CRIPPLING DEBT!


Episode 6 - All
"Yakuzavengers: Homecoming"
————————————————
Probably the most baffling, nonsensical climax of any Yakuza game so far, but that doesn't stop it from being hype!

My past self: ''Y'know, I think it's time I give Breakout a shot! It'll take me what, 10, 20 minutes to get something out of it? I'm sure I'll be done in a while...

My present self (2 hours later): ''Y'know, I used to be fucking stupid when I was younger!''

And you mean to tell me that founding Apple is Steve Wozniak's highest achievement? But... this shit is better than the MacBook!

Despite so many years of playing Breakout in different versions and in scattered moments, it never truly hit me till now how much fun of a game it actually is. You could have fun by yourself in Pong, it’s just like bashing your head against a wall: even if you end up enjoying, it’s not gonna last very long before something caves in.

Breakout answers to that idea by making that wall fun to bash against! It’s a back and forth against yourself that feels rewarding beyond the mere act of seeing the number score getting higher; dismantling that multicolored wall piece by piece is as simple as it is addicting, which it’s a lot.

Even tho Breakout’s pitch is pretty much ‘’Pong but singleplayer focused’’, I also like to think of it a sort of reinterpretation of pinball machines into videogame territory. A really simplistic one to be sure, but that lifts of elements from it that fit —like the strike system, with a certain number of balls given to you per coin to get a high score—, but also shifts away from the ‘’choose your own path/route’’ that the best machines make you feel and instead puts your objective in front of you. Am I overthinking things? Most likely! But it’s hard to not let your mind ponder over the little things as you break away and have a fun little time.

It’s one of those games that just works… except when it doesn’t. The rather clunky hit detection that was already present in Pong hasn’t gonna go anywhere, I would like to say that it’s just a matter that the paddle’s hitbox as the paddle itself, but it seems to depend more from where the ball is coming, sometimes making contact is enough, others you need to line up perfectly, and it can feel a little discouraging when it messes you up when you are having a good run. It does fix the speed of the ball on spawn tho, it makes it pretty much impossible to miss in your first throw and eases thing into getting as fast as hell, so ya win some ya keep some, I guess…

Breakout is still very much a win, and it doesn’t need dragons on the cover art to show that, it’s another piece of the massive domino that was the arcade industry of the 70’s, piece that would lead to amazing games like Space Invaders, but also a great piece on its own.

Trivia Time!

Contrary to what you may have heard, this is actually the best Donkey Kong game we've ever released. Why didn't you buy it? Koizumi-san was so SAD.

It should have been a hit! You all should have played it! We could have been 8 games deep in the Jungle Beat series by now! DK Bongos should have been littering tens of millions of basements across the globe just like sticky Wii Remotes and busted Joy-Con®! WE COULD HAVE ACHIEVED TRUE GREATNESS, BUT YOU LET KOIZUMI DOWN

Stay tuned for more Trivia Time segments in the near future!