I genuinely cant imagine a better remake for ttyd, from the tiniest of QOL changes like the partner wheel to all the knew graphics, character faces, and remastered sound track. i still have my orginal ttyd disc from when i was a kid, and i feel like a kid again. I know the game is a bit slower, but to be honest unless your a brain rotted ipad kid who cant sit still for 5 seconds it really doesn't matter. Hopefully the (so far) amazing reviews and feedback will keep paper mario afloat for future games, and praying we just go back to normal turned based combat (looking at you origami king)

Popful Mail is one of those games that's perfectly simple. It's as standard as these kinds of games come in terms of depth, but offering multiple characters with their own strengths added enough to keep things engaging and fun. I often find myself sticking to one specific character when given the option in many games, but Popful Mail's cast was in steady rotation for me.

The charming presentation and characters sweetened the deal even further. I enjoyed watching the cast's antics unfold from stage to stage. This is my introduction to Falcom's works, and I'd definitely like to explore more of what they have to offer after this one!

I don't know what it is about Artoon/Arzest making games with artstyles that look pretty cool, but once you start playing them they range from kinda weaksauce to genuinely painful. There's Ghost Vibration, Balan Wonderworld, Swords of Destiny... and, sadly, this one seems to make up the list as well.

I have nothing to criticize about the game art-wise. The music is sick and fits the game like a glove, and the artstyle is really cool, and i aboslutely love Blinx's chesire-cat design made by the designer of Sonic himself, Naoto Oshima. (even though the western cover of the game makes him look like a really dumb 90's 'tude mascot, which probably contributed to poor sales)
The biggest problem with Blinx is the gameplay, and the problem with Blinx's gameplay is the pacing. You play Mario 64, Rayman 2 or honestly pretty much any other 3D platformer for 10 minutes, and even if you've never touched a single platformer before, it all clicks within those 10 mins and you get better at the game from there. Blinx? I've played this shit for hours, and it still feels like i'm playing it wrong. The game seems to place an emphasis on being fast with the grades for levels that pretty much only factor how fast you beat them, yet the game features one of the slowest moving videogame characters i've ever played with, with really basic combat based around picking up trash and throwing it at enemies, which requires careful aiming. So you're trying to go fast with some of the most slow-as-molasses physics for a 3D platformer and with not-so straightforward combat. It's a recipe for tilting.

It wasn't until i looked up high-level playthrough clips of this game online that i figured out that this game actually does have a speedrun skill ceiling, i even realized that through a combination of Fast Forward pieces + Super Bombs you buy at the store, you can jump up to high areas you weren't meant to reach. The thing is, nearly every single pro-level gameplay vid i've seen seems to have mostly to do with spamming fast forward whenever available, and the other time pieces were at best only used to beat a few puzzles on levels. Other than a few sections where you can use Rewinds with falling platforms or breaking pillars to reach higher areas, FF feels like the only power that matters for beating levels fast. And some of the other tricks like the bomb jumping feel really pinpoint. Most intuitive hacks also just don't work. Try stacking barrels on top of eachother? The lower one will just get crushed.
Yeah, sometimes you have to get on some secret areas to get the cat medals, but they rarely ever seem to connect with the fastest routes for beating a stage. It feels like an artificial attempt at replayability by having some of the medals far-apart from the levels themselves so you have to choose between a beating a stage fast and getting a good grade, or getting the cat medals, on top of the fact that you'll have to replay some stages to grind for gold or get time pieces for another level sooner or later.
That's the thing about this game. Blinx isn't actually too hard to beat in and of itself, but it's REALLY hard to play in a satisfying way. Either you're concrete-scraping your way across the game with no style or regard for time or grades whatsoever, or you looked up playthroughs and guides and learned how to beat a level in 20 seconds. The learning curve is almost non-existant. It's no wonder why this game has such a small speedrunning community despite feeling literally built around that.

I had no idea it was possible to make a 3D platformer feel grindy until BLiNX came around. The earlier levels in the game only have about 100-400G to collect, so you have to be scoop up a shitton of gold in order to get Sweepers, Health Upgrades and Time Holders to make your job less annoying and it becomes yet another way for the game to try and make you replay stages for the hell of it. On top of that, you have to rebuy sweepers you've replaced. Swapped out the TS-16000 for the vacuum that sucks up water for a few secret cat medals on Deja Vu Canals? That'll be 4000 Gold plus tip.
For extra insult to injury, the best sweeper in the game is a 100% completion reward and still has to be bought at the Shop for 90000 gold. What's the point? By the time you even unlock this item you will already have done everything worthwhile in this game. It would have been better off as an unlockable for beating the game normally or just really expensive but available at World 7 or so.

Really though, i think the biggest thing holding this game back from being fun is the fact that they wanted you to beat ALL the enemies in order to beat levels. It's bad enough that time monsters become absolute hitsponges on latter levels and some of them like the frogs or the rolling spikes take an annoying amount of care, timing and precision to get rid of quickly, but it also really breaks the flow of levels that may initially seem big, open-ended and incentivizing to carve your shortcuts to the end of the level, by instead forcing you to basically follow a breadcrumb trail of enemies to complete them. You'll just have to accept the fact that stages in this game are a lot more linear than they seem.

Not to be a heretic and try to reform the Holy Blinx, but i feel this game could have been much more fun with two simple changes
1) Every stage having a 'minimum' amount of enemies to beat in order to clear it, this can vary depending on the size and difficulty of the stage, so that you can beat levels much faster with alternative paths.
2) Being allowed to buy the time pieces you need at the item stores. It would eliminate the need to replay levels just for the sake of getting the necessary time pieces for other ones. The game lets you do this with bombs and hearts already, so why not do the same for rewinds, fast forwards and such?

This game is basically an ongoing trainwreck of mechanics with decent potential just smashing into one another without any consistency. It is one of those "i really wanted to like it" kinda games for me. It's really hard for me to say i actually hate this game because... just fucking look at it, my god.
It's the official mascot platformer of the XBOX. The same console brand i always associated with fratbro american football games and Military Industrial Complex manly testosterone shooters, and it looks like a cartoony scrimblo furry fever dream. And with the Original Xbox itself being sometimes seen as a home for challenging games like Ninja Gaiden and all those Fromsoft titles, i do feel it's pretty fitting that the official mascot platformer is one built around speedrunning and tricks. You could probably even consider Blinx to be a pioneer in that territory, but Jesus Christ, if i was a nine year old in 2002, i wouldn't have known what the hell to make out of this game either.
I kinda wanna play the sequel now but i heard with that one they just ran out in the opposite direction and made the game really easy. I just hope it doesn't trivialize time controls too much.

I really wish I could feel the hype that some people put on this game, but it's just not all there for me. I'll start with the good, though.

The visuals and music were a treat. Stage environments were surprisingly detailed and vibrant, and I enjoyed some of the theming of said levels. The music I didn't find too crazy, but there were some solid and enjoyable tracks sprinkled in for sure!

The rest is where the cracks start to show, unfortunately. Boss design is cheesy and unengaging, with many moves and patterns feeling like they're designed for you to use I-frames and tank hits rather than confronting the boss in any interesting fashion. The levels are better, but not by much. Stage design blends together at times, with few memorable or fulfilling set pieces that make you go "oh man, that's good". None of the level design feels structurally interesting enough to warrant the long stage run-times, either.

Combat does little for me here as well. There doesn't feel like there's much of a reason to fight enemies, especially when the game spams them to the point where it feels almost as if it's encouraged to outright ignore them. Additionally it can really break the pace of some stages when you constantly have to stop-and-go with enemies spawning in odd places, ready to attack the moment they appear.

The story is... fine! I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I didn't dislike it either. What did get me though was some of the pacing. Some scenes reach near classic JRPG length with little to no gameplay to break it up. Conversely, some plot points felt like they were resolved far too quickly with little to no payoff.

Needless to say, I really hope Freedom Planet 2 brings some much-needed improvements to the table, because as of right now I'm really not feeling this formula.

You know, I think I'm a fair bit older than the target audience for this game.

It's a fine game. Pretty well polished, it has a lot of charm to it, and I really love the theater aesthetics through the whole game. Pretty solid music too. Most of it is your average orchestral stuff, but there are some fun exceptions. The Peach costume designs are all really solid too.

But the issue I guess is just that it's not really that fun or interesting. It just feels really sanitized and overproduced. I've played stuff so much better than this on all fronts.

This is where the target audience comes into play, cause I think someone near the age of 10 might enjoy this game a lot! It's very easy with some mildly tricky parts, and it's goofy enough that I think a kid would have a lot of fun with it. The different scenarios are imaginative enough too.

That being said, there are probably still better games you could give to a 10 year old. Ultimately, in my eyes, it's definitely a fine game, but it's just that. Fine. Nothing more, nothing less.

Nintendo's last true arcade title. Not like, literally a game made for arcades, but in terms of design. It's no secret that I basically don't like anything Nintendo has put out in almost 20 years at this point. The easiest answer for why is that their new titles are very safe, chaste, inbred games with few new ideas. This isn't to say their new stuff is strictly bad, far from it. There's still a competency somewhere there. It's kind of like the best playing garbage ever though. What defines modern Nintendo games is mainly the lack of any sort of design that approximates 'something.' What I mean is that it's all self-referential to what 'games' collectively are, and what Nintendo games used to be, rather than just simply being fun games with an identity that isn't so tautological. I ponder over this because DKJB has a lot of those 'square-hole' style ideas that went on to plague more modern entries; Being a sort of precursor to Mario Galaxy, by staff and design motivations. Yet this is one of the only modern Nintendo games where the design isn't frustratingly patronizing.

Arcade game design had you fit very dense encounter variety back to back into your games. The nature necessitated it. Time was literally money, but it was also a good way of keeping a game fresh in the eyes of venue frequenters. There were all kinds of flashy games, which due to primitive tech, had to come up with unique ways of executing a usually simple idea. Back then, there weren't many standards in place, so a game more naturally became what it wanted to be. Putting it super succinctly so we aren't here all day: Back then arcade games were inherently more engaging because the concept had to be front and center, and that 'flashiness' was delivered through gameplay density. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is a sidescrolling score attack game with a lot of ideas. From callbacks to the original Donkey Kong game with the logo font; To the barrel graze jingle, this game's explicitly introspective on the nature of arcade games. I see that even in how it controls. Just 3 inputs, Left, Right, and the 'Clap', which can be triggered by tapping the side of the bongos too. The somatosensory element of the controls are complemented by the frantic nature of the game as well. It can be very difficult to keep most combos going, and when DK grabs hold of enemies he beats the ever living daylights out of them. I'm pretty sure it was so violent it forced the ESRB to make E10+ because they didn't want this game to be rated T.

There's even an arcade game it actually closely resembles, in spirit and operation. Mach Breakers: Numan Athletics 2. A game about a superhuman decathlon. Mach Breakers also only has 3 inputs, insane mashing that really makes you FEEL the action of your characters, and above all extremely arcadey. I draw this comparison because there's even more DKJB could be paying homage to, that I may not be fully aware of because it's not exclusionary in that way. It's not some reference that exists solely for it's own value. It's kind of a more natural one, that I'm sure began during development as a coincidence and then they leaned into it as a genuine inspiration. I haven't even gone into the scoring system yet, which I find very interesting and well designed. Everytime DK does a unique action, such as backflipping, wall jumping, swinging, sliding up onto a ledge, etc; It adds to a combo trick meter. The combo stays going as long as you're in the air, unless you get hit. The combo counter acts as a multiplier for each individual instance of a banana you collect. Which bunches being their own multiple of 3. Additionally, when you grab many stray bananas at the same time using the clap motion it adds an additional amount by 1 per banana you caught. There's a lot they do with this. With all the unique enemy and banana layouts, it adds a lot of strategy to routing particular areas, without turning it into a chore necessarily. Because there's a lot of freeform stuff you can just try and do in the moment.

Not a whole lot of the game is up to scripted events. Even though you'd think there'd be a reason to add many of them because of the game's limited controls, the game uses them sparingly. Even when you grab a melon that was thrown at you as a projectile, there's still a chance it can miss when hit back because of poor positioning. But like, also, it has physics that do matter when being juggled by the claps soundwave. The game plays out mostly setpiece to setpiece, and the 'breaks' are still fraught with heavy mashing. It's a very involved game, but I love it for that.

I have like, at least 100k characters at minimum at the ready everytime to explain why I love this game; But I'll just explain it very succinctly here.

Treasure's games are designed with a 'Turing-completeness' to their greater design space. A term coined by John Carmack when describing Doom, it is essentially a game that presents infinite possibilities. The producer and creator of this game, Kafuichi went on record stating he wanted to make an action game that wasn't strictly memorizable. And even though the combat is very unbalanced, the boss AI generally being easy to throw loop, he really did succeed. Even though the game's relatively easy, any challenge the game throws at you posits some of the most emergent gameplay I've ever seen.

The attribute mechanic is very introspective and just, COOL. I love how the zero teleport analog in this game can launch enemies, at a perfect angle where they'll get subsequently juggled, and you can grab them out of mid air and pole vault off of them or use their bodies as bullet soaking shields. Everything Shyna can do in this game is additive to it's core conceit. The difficulty might be a bit lopsided to some, the last few bosses being very particular. It kind of reminds me of Cave Story, how the bloodstained sanctuary tests muscles the game didn't build, because nothing else is quite like it. I still love this game to death. It's easily the coolest game ever created.

An incredibly good platformer that needed some extra time in the oven.

The gameplay fundamentals of this game are some of the most enjoyable I've seen from a platformer in a long time - it's all about learning how to optimize your movement and getting a feel for the controls. Save for some minor grievances with control feel and wishing there was a bit more variety with level structure and bosses, the main thing that I feel could dock this game some points for people is the lack of polish. There are a few bugs that can lead to death, which I can see frustrating people. They didn't bother me too much, but I'd hate for a very fun game's reputation to be soured by something like this when it's overall quite good.