This game presents a lot of interesting and great ideas, but they're all hidden behind hours and hours and hours of tedious tests of patience. A Link to the Past is largely held back by a lack of modern conveniences, as well as general lack of direction. I think this game is great for children who have countless hours to spend walking around and exploring Hyrule, but as someone who has played any Zelda game that came out after this, it is a slog to get through. The dungeons are generally annoying to sift through, the Dark World is boring and annoying to traverse, the Light World is effectively a giant time waster once you finish three dungeons. There are only a couple of good dungeons in the game, and unfortunately they're the last ones and are still ridden with various issues the other dungeons (and the rest of the game) contain. I think the good ideas this game presents are done far better in later titles, so I really recommend only playing this if you want to play every Zelda game or if you haven't played one yet and want to see what all the hubbub is about.

This might be the worst game I've played in a very, very long time. The camera is terrible. All you ever do is walk around big, samey looking open areas that have as many popups as this scene from Free Guy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHwdLBxz7E4). The combat ranges from annoying to boring. It seems like it wants you to be able to do big combos, but every enemy dies in 2-3 hits except bosses who just stop taking damage whenever the game thinks they should be walking around now. I beat Darth Maul by repeatedly mashing the throw lightsaber button. He did not move until the game said I did enough damage that it was time for a cutscene to play where he moves somewhere else. Every level (the rare times that you get to engage with actual gameplay) is short, riddled with cutscenes and obnoxious dialogue, and is a flat out slog. Before a lot of levels you get to walk around the bland open areas, sometimes doing an "escort mission" where you hear the characters talk about The Plot and crawling at a snail's pace. The cutscenes aren't even remotely funny despite trying as hard as they can to be. The dialogue is ripped straight from the films with no deviation at all (no matter how boring), except that lines are re-recorded by the actors from The Clone Wars TV show. This game feels like exactly what it is: a Star Wars made by Disney in 2022. There are loading screens out the wazoo, and hoo boy do they take a while even with a beefy Gamer PC like I have. There are a billion menus with submenus that navigate slower than molasses. Do not buy this game.

Probably the worst Pokemon has to offer. A short game that's filled to the brim with the most annoying and intrusive story I've seen. Of my 20 hours of playtime in this game, I'd wager over half of that was spent mashing A to get through dialogue and cutscenes. The structure of the game is also weird. On release I didn't mind the trials, but on a replay I think the majority of them are very annoying to sit through. The game was only difficult at all because I chose not to evolve my starter, didn't fight most trainers, and used a monotype team. I cannot stress how awful the story is. On top of being intrusive like I said, the actual content of the story is terrible. It's all over the place with tone and has no buildup to the climax. For like 2 hours before the climax, you just get a complete break in the story and go fuck off somewhere else for a while. The first 10 hours of the story are spent doing nothing that has any impact on the last few hours of it, and it honestly felt like a massive waste of time. This game would have been better if they had decided to rely less on a shitty story and more on fleshing out interesting trials and islands. Bad game.

A very solid platformer. The cutscenes have a really nice style to them. The characters are charming and funny. The gameplay is really fun. Every time I learned a new skill it was really enjoyable to use and felt very smooth. Nothing in this game felt out of place. The mini-hubs in each area were pretty fun to traverse and puzzle out where to go next. The bosses were probably the weakest part of the game, although they each brought something unique to the table so kudos to that. I've heard Sly 2 is incredible so I'm excited to see how that improves upon this already stellar base.

DMC1 is - I think - the first character action game I've ever played. Hitting stuff in this game feels soooo good. The combo meter is a little wonky since it doesn't disappear or give indication the combo is over, so I kept thinking I could extend the combo only to have it reset to Dull. Combat is fun and I really enjoyed navigating the castle. This game rules! And then it hits Mission 15 or 16, and it really feels like they wanted to focus on the bad parts of the game. Navigation outside of the castle was very confusing for me. The map is extremely unhelpful and for some reason has completely inverted controls. Mission objectives are often very unclear. For some reason they decided to give boss rooms like 15 different semi-fixed camera angles in a game where a good amount of actions are tied to how you point your stick in relation to Dante's body (which also moves automatically if you're holding R1, which you have to do for some of these actions). There's a lot here, especially in the second half, that feels clunky and strange. I'm not sure who playtested the second half and thought "Yes, this is what we should do." That said, some of the bosses are super fun. The combat and hammy cutscenes carry this game to insane heights, but it falls flat by focusing very hard on its weaknesses.

With a few changes this game would be like twice as good. The lives system is archaic and shitty, especially with how long some levels can be. The game is split into 7 worlds with like 8 missions each. The first two are required to unlock the next world, and the rest are sort of optional. Or, they seem that way. Then you get to the 6th world and they tell you that you actually need to have beaten 25 missions to unlock the final world. So then you have to go back and do all those. The first two missions of each world are downright obnoxious. By the time I found out I had to basically double the amount of levels I'd finished, I was really annoyed with this game. Then I did a bunch of the "optional" levels and actually had a great time. Going into the final level, my opinion on this game had completely turned around. I was having a blast. Then I played the final level and had to deal with all the boredom therein. The final boss is tedious and slow.

This game's weakest part is the combat, but holy hell does this game want to put you in combat. The platforming is actually pretty fun once you get used to the movement, although it could very clearly do with some improvements. The music (mostly) rules, with few duds in the soundtrack. Final opinion on this game is that it took away 8 hours of my life that could've been lowered to 5 or 6 if it didn't suck so much. There's a lot of potential here, but being made by Sonic Team and in 2003 really makes it hard to love. It'd be cool to see a spiritual successor by someone who sees what this game could be if it were made Not Shit.

In the battle between Game Dev Story and Game Dev Tycoon, I think GDT comes out on top. They're fairly similar and both very simple. However, GDT's absurd amount of topics to choose from when making a game really helps it feel like your choice matters there, and the use of sliders over choosing an individual employee for each stage of production aids in making you feel more like a studio of workers and less like you're just picking the guys with the best stats every time (even though you still kind of do? I didn't and was successful, but my friend did and he beat my score by 20 million points so...).

There are some areas where the game falls flat. Only six genres feels a little lacking, although you do eventually gain the ability to double-up on genres which opens for a bit more experimentation. Not having a yearly Game Awards to judge how you're doing against other developers was a bit disappointing, as gunning for GOTY in GDS was always my favorite part. GDS also created a more filled out world, as silly as it sounds. Having news reports of crazy characters to hire like a pro wrestler or a bear was really fun. GDT has none of that, and the only pop-ups you get are for new consoles or for Game Hero to tell you your game was ass when everyone else gave it 10s.

Game Dev Tycoon is definitely a step in the right direction for a game dev simulator, but I'd be lying if I said anything other than "5/10. Looking forward to the sequel!"

My understanding of Zapper is that it was made because the studio who made Frogger 2 wanted to make another Frogger game but didn't get the rights. Zapper is basically Frogger 3 because of this, and my God is it fun. It's quick and super easy to get a grasp on. Enemies move when you do for the most part, which makes some sections into quick puzzle platforming, but in a different way than the rest of the game is a quick puzzle platformer. The levels are fairly short and have a few secret rooms that bump up the challenge. The difficultly of the game comes from how snappy some of your decisions have to be combined with solid jump timings. I will say that sometimes I wasn't sure if a space was a bottomless pit, or if a specific tile was safe, but the game gives you plenty of lives to mess around with and continues don't really hinder much in terms of progress because of how short the levels are. Lives systems are generally shit, but Zapper's didn't bother me enough for it to be worth complaining about.

I don't know if I just didn't see an intro cutscene or if I should've read some back of the box stuff, but I had no idea of the story of the game until the final boss. I didn't know why I was collecting bird eggs/slightly hatched birds, until I found out in the last 5 minutes that a bird in a science place(?) kidnapped my brother. Still don't know why I've been collecting bird eggs this past hour, but after beating the game I've deduced that Zapper just wanted to watch TV with his brother, and I think that makes Zapper one of the most relatable characters in video games.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe accomplishes everything it set out to do. Having not played the original since it's launch in 2013, there were a few things I remembered, such as the downstairs ending and the broom closet ending. Beyond that, nothing had really stuck with me. Playing the game again now, almost 10 years later, it's shocking to see so many people clown on the game for one reason or another. The writing and humor is still very sharp. The jabs thrown at gamers and the games industry in Ultra Deluxe are well-deserved, my favorite among them mocking a Steam review that seems to have missed the point of the game entirely. Or maybe there's a layer beyond that jab that I'm missing, and now I'm the butt of the joke.

The hall of memories takes the game in such an interesting direction. It points out the flaws in sequels as a means to extend things beyond their natural life. Perhaps my favorite part of the Ultra Deluxe additions comes from the collectathon. The game explicitly tells you that you will receive no achievement nor congratulations for collecting the figurines. Yet, I felt the game was trying to point me towards collecting the figurines anyway. After collecting them, I was met with exactly what they told me: I was not congratulated, and I was not rewarded. The ending therein was a bit extended as a result, but I felt the dive into the minds of completionists was an interesting choice. And, after that ending, the game simply resets as it would after any other ending. There truly was no sparkly achievement or reward given to the player. The only reward was the same as playing the game any other way: an ending and then a reset.

I'm not smart enough to figure out what exactly the point of it all is, nor do I really care to. The game invokes a lot of feelings in me that remind me of reading a well-written book or watching a beautifully crafted talkie. For that reason, I think The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is worthy of having at least two museums dedicated to it within itself. #BroomClosetGang

[Played on Easy because it was a lazy Sunday] This game is really funny. It starts because your ship is under attack by some aliens, then you go to fuck them up for a bit and find out you landed on a giant weapon. So you go to find out more about the weapon and a floating robot teleports you around for a bit before you find out the weapon is actually going to kill the entire galaxy so the zombies can't spread. And the game ends with you not blowing up the galaxy or something. Shooting is fun, the pistol is great, the Flood are a scary enemy to face, and the enemy sounds are goofy. Looking forward to playing Halo 2 and the rest.

A very good game. The music is sooooo good. Normally I don't pay much mind to music in games, but NitW's is so insanely good. The game is generally just really good, and my two biggest gripes are that I didn't personally care for probably 1/3 of the dialogue I encountered, and I felt there wasn't much of a point to the platforming. There weren't many rewards for platforming "challenges" (although the constellation stuff was really enjoyable and the music was incredible). The dialogue was good in that it felt like a real group of friends, but my main issue was simply that they don't talk like the kind of friends I keep for the most part so it felt a little grating for the characters to be the ZOMG!!! type at times.

Much more competent than the predecessor, although it lacks the charm. Gen 2 purposefully made the game more open-ended although it creates a terrible level curve for over half the game that is plainly unfun. Johto as a region makes me feel weird, and going back to Kanto takes like 3 hours to beat which is a fun and short post-game. The non-linearity should have just been saved for Kanto in order to ensure Johto is actually fun. Unfortunately they didn't do that. Johto is also the start of Pokemon devs going "Hey, let's introduce all of these cool new Pokemon and make sure nobody can get any of them until after they beat the game!" Thanks Gen 2, you ruined the next 6+ generations. At least your music is good and you have cool birds. Pokemon is just plainly an enjoyable system so I can't hate Gold too much, but it definitely felt like a step down from Blue.