Probably the most fun I've ever had with a Pokemon rom hack. The essentially limitless possibilities when combining Pokemon made this game a real treat. High quality sprites for tons of different and wild combinations, and it's really easy to add new sprites that community members have made too! Even outside of the fusion gimmick, the game still has tons of content. A Johto post-game done better than the official Kanto post-game, tons of legendaries and side quests, and even the Sevii Islands are more fun than in FRLG in my opinion. If you're looking for something Pokemon to play, it's hard to go wrong with Infinite Fusion. Unfortunately the difficulty settings are pretty meh, with hard mode having some great changes save for the 10% level increase. Still, the customization options allowed for playthroughs adds a lot of replayability.

Great gameplay, except for the buffer on actions that for some reason extends all the way after you get hit. Didn't pay much attention to the lore in this one but the bits I did pick up on seemed variable in quality. Some of it seemed cool and interesting, some of it seemed lame and made me roll my eyes. Loads of great bosses, some of my favorites in the series thus far. Didn't finish Ringed City yet but do plan on going back to finish up what i left behind. Some decent areas, although nothing remotely close to the heights of 1 and 2, and the worst of it is far worse than anything in 1 and 2. Still a great time overall and I can see the building blocks that eventually led to Elden Ring here.

Fair warning: I played this game on Normal so if that invalidates everything I'm about to say, please let me know.

Spark 2 feels remarkably like one of those videos you'll see on Twitter where someone is showcasing this game they're working on where you just move very fast and that's about it. The levels are super fun for taking, at most, 3 minutes to complete. Unfortunately there's only like 15 or so of them. There are enemies and collectables scattered around the levels, but I was generally going way too fast to even consider stopping and grabbing most of the collectables. I think I only fought 3 enemies in the stages and that was because I was forced to in order to progress/beat the stage in the routes I went. The levels themselves are laid out more like a 2D Sonic game than a 3D Sonic game, which some people might adore. Personally, I'm more of a 3D enjoyer, but even then the levels were still fun. I just wish they were a tad longer because I'm not really the kind of person to go back and try to beat my times for the sake of it. If you are, you'll probably love this aspect.

The combat is. uh. I'm not really sure why it's here. Like I said, 99% of the enemies in the game are completely inconsequential. The majority of the combat is on boss fights which, at least on Normal, consisted of mashing the attack button and pressing shield when they were about to attack to take 0 damage and build more damage multiplier. Even though the combat existing confounded me, it still felt pretty good to actually hit things even if it was just a mash X simulator.

The music is great. I don't really have the vocabulary to tell you why it's so great, but it felt like it captured a lot of different things that people love about Sonic music.

Game only took me 1.5 hours to beat and I got it for Christmas so I'd say it was worth it for me.

Great game through and through. Substantially better mash A to win combat than in KH1 or Re:CoM, and much flashier to boot. Tons of cool looking and good feeling modes and summons, and the expansion on the combo system was fun even if I didn't use to nearly it's fullest extent. Played on standard and skipped pretty much every optional boss because that's not the kinda guy I am, and still managed to have a great time. I also very much enjoy the story of KH and KH2 is no slouch when it comes to delivering tons of more Nomura-shit for me to drop my jaw at. If you can take life a little less seriously, I'd recommend KH2.

Cool game! I wish there was only combat for bosses, the general enemy combat was more annoying than enjoayble but most of the bosses were extremely fun. Puzzles were cool, just wish there were more throughout the game. Felt kinda end-loaded in that regard. Story seems neat, but there was only so much I was able to gather in a non-100% playthrough. The language and manual are very fun to decipher, although I do wish there were some way to keep notes in-game. I suppose that may be an intentional choice as the entire manual mechanic harkens back to what boomers will tell you they had to do when playing Zelda 1. In that way Tunic creates a kind of game that's very difficult to find in the modern day, and I think that's something really special. Basically the only parts of this game I really didn't like were the combat, which I found to be pretty unbearable against certain extremely common enemies. Tunic is a pretty good study in realizing that not every game needs to have enemies and combat all the time. Good game though.

Dark Souls 2 is a really interesting way to do a sequel. Change up a lot of the good from the first and make those things bad, but also add some new things and make them good. The introduction of Adaptability is so annoying and I'll forever be thankful they haven't brought it back to date. Overall it felt less memorable than Dark Souls 1, and that aided to the dreamlike feel of the entire game. I don't know if that's what they were intended this game to feel like, but every turn felt completely alien to me in the sort of way where my only response a groggy "yeah ok lets see where this goes." My friend likes to describe Dark Souls 2 as Fromsoft's B Team's fan fiction, and after seeing a certain someone return I can't help but agree wholeheartedly. Still had a great time and so glad I got to dual wield +10 lightning zweihanders.

i played this game for like 3 hours. it's just really boring. the guns felt ok to shoot but the first story quest has you fighting armored robots that negate all your damage so it was a slog. i never really understood what i was doing (because i didnt pay attention). i got my ship working and as soon as i saw the galaxy map or whatever i uninstalled the game. the controls are weird. for example, X is how you reload, interact with objects, and talk to people. in the menus, X and A are both used to confirm stuff but only in specific contexts where the other isn't even used. B skips through dialogue, whereas it's A in all the Bethesda games (which this is very clearly using as a base for gameplay). the leveling system didnt really feel like i was getting much reward. all the characters were just kind of annoying. i'd hazard against playing this one and instead just going for a walk.

Frogger's Journey: The Forgotten Relic starts with a shot of Frogger's giant, detailed feet while he lounges in a chair on his lawn. Then a plane crashes into his house and he has to go find his missing archeologist grandpa. His grandpa's anthropomorphic fox lady assistant kinda helps guide you along the way, but most of the time she just tells you to go talk to the random, unnamed NPCs around town until a new level opens up. This game is kind of like Zelda in that it gives you different items after every level and then you use them in the next level, but some of them are nearly worthless while some are actually fun and useful. After doing a bunch of stuff like fighting the Sphinx, going to Atlantis, and infiltrating the ninja squirrel hideout three times, it turns out your giant dog mechanic was actually working for Eric the evil weasel the whole time and you have to beat up their robots and fight Eric in a volcano or something. The difficult curve of the game looks kind of like this: ___/\\_. It's very long, and moving around as a Frogger is always a treat, but if you wanna play this be warned that the last few levels made me want to tear my hair out and jump into a pool like Frogger (he cannot swim).

Scaler is an interesting game. If you don't read the back of the box, the intro cutscene makes no sense to you. Even if you do read the back of the box, it still might not make much sense. You play as Bobby "Scaler" Jenkins, a lizards' rights activist who stumbled upon a world domination plot conducted by his neighbor who is actually a lizard. Bobby is turned into a lizard, known as Scaler, and goes through a portal to the dimension that his neighbor came from. He meets his dad here, although his dad doesn't remember being his dad until most of the way through the game. There's isn't a ton of development there, but the ending is what really struck me as odd about this game. Scaler goes through the portal back to his dimension and his dad barely doesn't make it. Scaler, once again Bobby, yells for his dad as the portal closes and the game fades to the credits. I'm honestly not sure if they were trying to set up for a sequel or what the plan was there, but I was laughing pretty hard at the end.

Gameplay-wise, Scaler is a 3D platformer. You jump around areas, grind on rails, and because all video games need it, there are combat sections where you have to beat waves of enemies. The combat is pretty barebones and kinda sucks. Most of the combat was just spamming X to use the tongue to insta-kill weaker enemies or stun larger enemies so I could spam B and kill the larger enemies while they were stunned. The rail sections work absurdly well considering how fucking awfully they work in every Sonic game that came out around this time. I'm still shocked at how Scaler could pull that off without any issues and SEGA completely missed the ball time after time. The big thing that sets Scaler apart from other platformers of it's era (aside from working rail sections) are the transformations. Scaler can turn into specific enemies you've sort of absorbed after beating enough of them. You can only turn into specific enemies on specific levels, but the game does do some interesting things with this. It allows for more interesting boss fights than would have probably been available as base Scaler. There are unique platforming sections focused around these transformations. For example, when you turn into the ball guy (Krok or something?) there are race sections where you have to complete 4 challenges in order to beat the level. Some of them are races, some are time trials, some are breaking obstacles along the track within a time limit. There is a transformation where you can fly and have to go through rings in a time limit. While you sadly can't use every transformation in every level, limiting it this way did allow the devs to make levels more interesting and enjoyable.

The art looks like you'd expect from a studio that primarily made movie licensed games. Which is to say, it doesn't look that good graphically. The design of everything is fairly interesting and does look like what I'd imagine an evil lizard dimension/planet to look like, although I do wish there were more variety in the environment beyond the occasional color change.

Scaler is surprisingly competent considering I went into this expecting something on the level of what you'd expect from a forgotten 3D platformer in the 6th gen called "Scaler." Definitely worth a shot, and it's fairly short to boot.

People love to rave about SSX Tricky. "Oh man it's so good," they say. Well guess what? It's fine. It has some really good tracks, like Tokyo or Hawaii. It has some awful tracks, whose names I've buried in the recesses of my mind. The showoff mode was less interesting to me than something like the Tony Hawk games. Having to unlock tricks through the trickbook didn't interest me in the slightest. Maybe it's because I have the notion that SSX games are racing games, so I naturally looked forward to the races more. The actual racing in Tricky is mediocre. There's no punch like in SSX 3, the only SSX I'd played before this one, and it makes knocking down opponents very odd. It felt like every time I collided with an opposing racer, whether by my fault or theirs, it was a dice roll as to who got knocked down or pushed in what direction. The controls are fine, nothing stand-out in my opinion. Learning the little intricacies of the landscapes and physics was pretty fun. Tricky is an ok game.