I will split these up into 3 mini-reviews: one for each title. I will dive into these in more detail in my Xbox 360 reviews, as that was where I first played each Mass Effect game.

Mass Effect
While the game is showing its age, especially in the gameplay department, this universe is one of the most detailed and fascinating ever created. There are so many incredible scenes, and from a storytelling, world building, and lore perspective, this IS the best Mass Effect game. It is my personal favorite of the trilogy...

They did an excellent job remastering this one and making it much more playable. The Mako controls were much improved from the original release. It was also my first time playing any of the DLC for these games - the one in ME1 was alright, but nothing special, especially in comparison to the others in ME2 & ME3.

Final Score: 4.5/5

Mass Effect 2
Characters, characters, characters... while the first game had a great cast as well, and has ME2 beat severely in its main plot, the cast of characters in ME2 are beyond fantastic. I love almost each and every one of them (there are always a couple exceptions)!

Playing through ME2's DLC for the first time...gave me mixed feelings. On one hand, it was fun and exciting to experience new Mass Effect stories and missions... but I am also angry at Bioware/EA for not including these in the main release. They are integral to the story and shouldn't have been optional. The Shadow Broker, Arrival, and Overlord missions were incredible and elevated my replay of the game immensely. I loved playing through them for the first time!

Final Score: 4.5/5

Mass Effect 3
I almost didn't play this one... I had such a negative impression of ME3 on release, I almost just stopped at ME2. The wounds of being utterly disappointed and despising this title still ringing in the back of my head from a decade prior...

So I never thought I'd say this...but I'm glad I decided to replay it. With a new perspective and understanding of what this game was going into it, along with the additional DLC components (Citadel DLC is hilarious and a great love letter to all Mass Effect fans), I came away from one of my most hated games of all time, with a new respect and appreciation for it.

This game has so many amazing payoffs to the entire series. And its emotionally impactful moments are powerful ("Someone else might have gotten it wrong"). These are the things I'm glad to have re-experienced as I didn't value or appreciate them during my first playthrough all those years ago.

I will say though... the DLC in this one, just like in ME2, should have been part of the base game... it is utterly reprehensible that the goddamn Prothean team member was Day 1 DLC back then! This was also my first time seeing the "improved" ending, as I beat it back on the Xbox 360 when it had a single ending: just different colors...red, blue, or green. It was horrendous back then... and while it still isn't great in my opinion, it is better at least.

Unfortunately, there are still more than a few major issues I have with ME3 that haven't gone away (Kai Leng, Deus Ex Crucible, Star Child, lack of party members, RPG elements stripped entirely away), but there is a lot of great stuff in this too, that I underappreciated at the time.

Final Score: 4/5

Annoying and not fun combat gets in the way of exploring a beautiful world full of intrigue and puzzles.

Tunic has a bit of an identity crisis - is it Fez? A 2D Zelda? A Souls-like? It attempts to answers all of those questions with "yes" and then trips over itself while trying to deliver one cohesive experience. If this were a 2D Zelda with Fez-like puzzles to solve, this would be a dream. But for whatever weird reason, the devs decided they wanted this to have ultra challenging combat encounters that are frankly just not fun.

Across the board, every podcast I listened to recommended two things with the game.
1. Don't look up any guides if you can help it
2. Put the game on "No Fail" mode.
It's a pretty wild that the best way to experience this game is to not engage with 50% of the mechanics in it.

I loved bumming around the beautiful world finding stuff and solving puzzles, even if sometimes the weird geometry of the world made finding secrets more about running into every hidden corner and less about carefully studying the world to discover things. There were a few moments in this game where I figured something out and I openly laughed out loud at the brilliance of it. It's got some incredibly cool stuff in it especially if you like solving puzzles but boy do I wish I could make the combat easier without simply making myself invulnerable.

+ Beautiful world
+ Incredibly satisfying puzzle-solving
+ Fantastic soundtrack

- Bad and overly difficult combat
- No variable difficulty settings - it's either hard or you're invincible.
- Finding secrets can feel random

Picross 3D: Round 2!

I did a short review of this a while ago, but I'm redoing it since I can word my thoughts better, and cause I did a long-er review on the first game. Let's go!

So, just like the first game, it's a 3D take on Picross. Instead of a square filled with squares, you get a cube made of cubes! You have to chip away at the cubes to reveal the shape. Unlike the first game, you have to paint each block as well. Instead of just very-square models, your shapes in this game are stylized as wooden figures! Here's the game cover, for an example. You get two colors: orange and blue. Orange numbers are used for curved blocks and non-straight lines of blocks, and blue is for straight lines of blocks. This game also introduces a bomb button, which will clear all the 0 blocks. It's very useful to shave off time and also so you don't accidentally tap the wrong thing and get a strike. While you do get strikes, you can only get a game over in time trials/one-chance challenges. Outside of those, strikes only affect your score.

Instead of being sorted by difficulty like the first game, this game has puzzles themed by category from the start, referred to as books. The actual puzzle difficulty is adjustable from easy, normal, and hard. You can only get the highest gem ranking if you play on hard, but you only need the white gems to unlock more books.

The presentation is really where this game shines. The game is themed after a cafe/book shop. Your file is referred to as a membership card, and you get stamps for every 3000 points, and can get up to 10 stamps. This is also why the categories are referred to as books! Each book has it's own unique cover. As mentioned earlier, the actual puzzles are themed as wooden figures! In exchange for the styliaztion of the figures, the puzzles aren't animated here. The music is all various flavors of jazz, and I think is probably one of the best soundtracks ever made for a game. There's also some nice detail in the sound design, such as the noises for painting cubes orange and blue being different from one another.

There's no puzzle maker or sharing like the first game, unfortunately. There's some amiibo puzzles, but that's about it for fun extras. The Kirby ones are specifically themed to also be related to the game.

I think the only real downside to this game is that it's SUPER easy to make a misinput, but the first game has that problem too. Such is the nature of a touch screen based game.

I think this is the best game ever made. Its first ever (and probably only!) five star rating. (And my first rating ever, actually!)

If you like puzzle games or touch-screen based games, I absolutely recommend it!

Thanks for reading!

The game being as flabbergasted at the fact 18-Volt is a nine year old as much as I was probably one of the most hilarious part of a game that quite literally made me smile and laugh every single moment I was playing it.

When making a game which its main premise is that it re-uses content from past entries, developers are faced when simple yet ever-present question: ''How in the all living hell do we make this worth it?''. Nostalgia and getting to re-experience past games or parts of them in brand new systems can be cool incentives, but I'd be hard-pressed to say they are strong ones; the content by itself it's nothing new, so why would we, as players, be interested on not only re-experiencing content that we have already played, but also pay for it?... Well, turns out WarioWare Gold found an answer, a trick...


The trick of haVING JIMMY T. ON THE GAME WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO LET'S-A FUCKING GOO, GETTIN' FIT AND FUNKY BABY!

The decision of playing the rest of the series beforehand was one of the best I could have ever made, because what would still be a fantastic game into an even more impressive one; even if a majority of WarioWare Gold is stuff we have already seen, it manages to make it feel new thanks to a collection of elements that span the entirety of the series plus a new barrage of brand-new content. Gold is the best celebration the series could have ever hoped for: 316 micro-games are nothing scoff at, overpassing even Twisted and its almost 230 fast paced minigames, but as I said before, most of these are micro-games already seen in previous entries, including twisted, so what makes this number shouldn't be so special... but then you see the selection, and then realize this is pure FIRE. Because there was so much to choose from, they picked the best and ONLY the best minigames on the entire series; in the past, with maybe the exception of Twisted there were a few amount of stinkers that were clearly lacking in quality compared to others, and even tho they only lasted a few seconds, in a game so fast paced as WarioWare that still leaves a huge impression. Not anymore: every single one if the crème de la crème, even the new ones, and so everyone may not be here, but that doesn't matter 'cause the best sure are. It even has a Rhythm Heaven minigame thrown in there, you can't make this up! That isn't even going into the Challenges, where we find the expected but always welcomed micro-game towers, plus some new stuff like the fantastic Wario Interrupts, but most of all, the return of Wario Watch and Sneaky Gamer, the former my favorite mode in ANY of the previous games and the latter being the best part of Game & Wario, and after playing, I completely understand why. Now that I think about it, the only games that might not get any kind of representation are Snapped and D.I.Y, which makes sense, one is a departure from the series focused on creating the games, and the other one is... well, is WarioWare Snapped. The rest tho? All gameplay styles come back, even the microphone, and the one game you expect to not see, Smooth Moves actually has a ton of representation, with a couple of minigames being adapted to be controlled in the twisted section; if you think about a thing of the series which there is a way it could be implemented here, then it is implemented here, and that effort for consistency is commendable.

Now, I know I said at the beginning that Gold was more than a simple collection… to then proceed to list things that are returning, but as I also said, is how it manages that returning stuff plus the never seen content what makes it so special, and regarding that new content… Am I the only one that loves how this game handles humor? Like, I adored how past games handled story and humor: as the gameplay itself, it’s pure chaos, incredibly light of dialogue and centered around the bat-shit insanity that plagues everyone. Gold takes a different approach, not only having a pretty more involved story, but actual dialogue, like, REALLY good dialogue; the jokes and on point, and even when some cut-scenes are longer than in previous games, it truly doesn’t feel like it like it did in Touched; it’s still fast-paced and entertaining, only now with sublime voiceovers (in fact the Spanish translation and dubbing is also pretty phenomenal) and mini-stories that are as crazy as ever, only now they connect to the Wario and Lulu cinematics, which, I know that Wario is loved by everyone, including me, but here, his mannerism, his voice-over, his interactions with Lulu and the cast, the way he simply IS, this is by far the best iteration of the character in not only the WarioWare series, but in the entirety of the Mario series as a whole, I love this greedy bastard to death and love him to see him be as dastardly as much to see him fail, they just nailed him here. And that sentiment goes for everyone else, character shine like never before and whereas in the past I only really care about Jimmy T. and maybe Orbulon, I now adore this group of weirdos in a way I didn’t really see coming, like, this game made me like Fronk and fucking Joe, how do you even accomplish that?! This, with the more non linear game you can tackle the different leagues and how Diamond City is shown, makes it one of the most different WarioWare games by far, but every change introduced makes sense and it’s welcomed, and other new additions, like the missions and the store, on top of ALL the other stuff, like small side content like the extra minigames (which includes a Pyoro one and I for one I’m the happiest person on earth right now) and the ability to dub the cutscenes… yeah, this might just be the biggest package in the entirety of the series while also being the most fun by a landslide.

I knew I was gonna have fun, but MAN did this game make me happy; it made me feel rewarded for investing my time into this already amazing series, a love letter that even if released 1 year after the switch launched and doesn’t have a 3D option, I kind of really like that it’s on the 3DS? It still feels right a home, and hey, having two screens makes it possible to play Sneaky Gamer, so on that alone makes it worth it.

To me, Gold is the single best experience in the franchise, Twisted is to this day the best out the full-blown original games, but Gold fills me with such joy, is so fun, so consistently fucking amazing in almost every way, that I cannot for the life of me say it’s not my preferred game. I’m so glad I got to play this series in its entirety, and I’m so happy this is the send-off, or at least until Move It! releases, but until then, we found Wario peak…


…and you know, I could finish this review off with yet another Wario-related joke, but you know what? Nah, I’m good. For once, let the final note be how unironically great Wario is, and how this silly greedy garlic enjoyer, his crew and his dumb ass minigames can be so fantastic… holy hell, what a great franchise…

Where have I been for the past month you ask? Aww, thanks for asking, but I have been ruining my brain by achieving a platinum save on Picross 3D: Round 2; and after having gotten the highest rank on all 301 puzzles within this game, I belive I am qualified to provide my take on it. A take wherein I am bias, Picross games are my favorite puzzles games out of the bunch, and this one is certaintly one of the greats. With amazing puzzles, fun challenge books every once and a while, and a long selection of unlockables and puzzles. All together making Picross 3D: Round 2 one of the greatest in its class. Made me feel like Phidias carefully sculpting away the Statue of Zeus in every puzzle.

i have hallucinations of seeing blue and orange numbers everywhere

just when you think you're finally done the game goes "just kidding fucker. you fuckign idiot. here's like 20 more stages"

this is the best video game i think

major props to hal lab for avoiding cashing in on yearly picross 3d releases like in the 2d series; round 2 is a complete overhaul of the original concept. the original picross 3d struggled with integrating its 3d nature into the actual puzzle solving, as the game's loop involved slicing its three-dimensional voxel sculptures into two-dimensional slices, where row hints pointing towards the player had next-to-no bearing on the solution of any given slice. round 2 instantly solves that by transforming the game's mechanics into an adaptation of color picross from the main series, where instead of chiseling out a monochrome image, you instead have to deal with multiple colors on each line. hints perpendicular to a slice now show the possible colors for that particular block, and thus the loop now involves checking hints on all three axes instead of just the slice's primary two. switching to colors also vastly increases the potential number of hint arrangements. as in the first game, each hint may indicate an unbroken string of blocks, two separate strings of blocks, or three+ strings of blocks, but now each of the two colors can have its own variable number of strings per row. the amount of different idioms that arise from this far surpass the original game.

what makes this particular interesting is that the coloration of the blocks is not random or chosen purely mechanically: it actually reflects the construction of each puzzle. the voxels of the original game are now marked blue, and new, variably shaped, curved blocks are marked orange. this addition adds substantial context to the chiseling process: compared to the rectangular jumble of the original, you can now clearly make out the structure of what you're building over time. while aesthetically pleasing in its own right, this also assists with the mental leg work, as educated guesses can be made much more easily with a rough idea of the puzzle's shape and edges. this creates some pseudo-idioms in its own right as well: for example, edges with a taper at either end generally appear as a single blue string and then two one-block orange strings. the game can get quite inscrutable at times without some real brute forcing of all the different possibilities, so the organic natures of the game's mechanical structures eases some of the tedium and allows for some guesswork.

I played a couple more rounds of the original just to feel it out, and honestly playing this has dampened my enthusiasm for that entry. so many QoL additions here, from the ability to swipe across the screen to break/paint a bunch of blocks in one go to finally being able to isolate the edge-most slice from any direction. the structure here has been changed from tiered assortments of puzzles from easy to hard to thematically driven "books" of puzzles, with the easy/normal/hard selection individualized for each puzzle. goes a long way in making the on-ramp smooth coming out of the original; no need to slog through the piss-easy stuff if you already have some experience with the concept. the ranking system is also much more granular, with your amount of misses (now including incorrect painting, unlike the first title) and time taken now converted to a numeric score, which gets multiplied against the chosen difficulty of the puzzle to get your final score and rank. also a testament to how difficult this game can get: later puzzles can have top "rainbow" ranks allow for 25-30 minutes on a single puzzle with up to three or four misses. the very final puzzle in the game took me over 45 min!

I went into this game mostly blind and it was a very fun ride.
I had heard very little about this game besides it not having a huge reception at launch, so I didn't much pay attention until it recently came to PS+

I had fun with mutliple aspects of it, the visuals are very creative and the world and it's set pieces very memorable and unique, the story is goofy more often than not with a looot of "Marvel" writing bits, but actually original plot twists and world rules.
The combat is fun albeit a tad repetitive but in the run time of the game it never starts to feel like a bother, plus the clear inspirations from Doctor Strange type magic leads to a very fun fantasy combat loop.

It is worth a try, but the biggest down point is the full price, the game shines the most when you feel like you only paid for a AA experience.