It's short and sweet, with plenty of little extras to find that can extend the playtime if you're willing. The minigames in the hub areas are fun, and exploring those to find the next level is a good treat. I'm not particularly fond of how 2D Sonic controls in conjunction with the stop and go level design that tends to creep up at least half the time, but this one was pretty enjoyable all things considered. Being able to play different characters opens up even more paths, and having a partner that gives you an addition to your moveset adds a lot of replayability. Very possibly my favorite 2D Sonic, although I'll admit I've played few.

The beginning of Plague of Shadows was somewhat annoying. Only being able to throw bombs downwards for the first couple stages is absurdly annoying, and Plague Knight's jump control is very unwieldy. Over time, I grew a lot more fond of this mode and by the last 3rd of the game was actually completely enjoying myself. I think the first half or so has a difficult readjustment curve. It doesn't feel like most platformers I've played before, and it certainly doesn't feel like Shovel of Hope. Still a fairly fun game and I like Yacht Club's approach to letting you play as different characters through the same levels. Always a treat.

Too many power-ups that are never used in levels aside from the wall jump, which you get horribly late. Sometimes the dash is useful, but rarely. Everything else is a combat ability in a game where your jump attack is far and away the best option 99% of the time. Bubble shield breaks the game by allowing you bypass most of the piss easy platforming. Too many autoscrollers for my blood. Music is good, art is pretty nice. I got this game because I thought it'd be Shovel Knight with a grappling hook, only to find out it isn't a very good Shovel Knight and the grappling hook is so useless it shouldn't have been included to begin with. There are so many clashing elements in this game that don't work together. I still can't understand how they added so many power-ups and failed to use them in any stage. If you're gonna add combat upgrades, make sure to include worthwhile combat in your game. If you're making a platformer, for the love of God please make sure you actually use the platforming abilities. Fucking Guacamelee did both better and I hate that game, too. At least this game was short.

While not as mechanically sound as any of the previous Metroids (Zero Mission, AM2R, & Super), Fusion is still pretty solid. I particularly enjoyed the maps and art, and the fusion suit is my favorite design of Samus thus far. The map in Fusion is my favorite of any game, both the playable map and the start button map. Unlike previous Metroids, this game actually has a story presented to the player throughout the game rather than some small thing mentioned at the beginning or end of the game. Unfortunately, that story isn't really much of note, but it's a nice change of pace nonetheless. Sadly, this is where the praise ends. Despite being made in 2002, Fusion feels like a Wii/Wii U era Nintendo game where every fun mechanic is entirely gutted. No bomb jumps, God-awful walljumps, and only one button to aim diagonally. On top of these issues, the game is excruciatingly linear to the point of tedium. There is one section in the entire game that can be sequence broken, and even then it isn't a particularly fun one to break as you're immediately sent back to do what you should've done in the first place. A fair amount of the bosses are garbage, taking up half the screen and zipping around with the smallest damage zones of all time. I wish this game were better, as it's the only Metroid I actually own, and I've had it since I got my Gameboy Advance back in like 2003. I have a really heavy soft spot for it, but unfortunately the game just isn't that good by Metroid standards. Still a better game than plenty others I've played, but after playing the previous three games, I gotta say this was clearly the weakest.

Fable is a weird one. While playing, the story seems very nonsensical and confusing. Characters do things or die and the game never seems concerned with making the player feel anything about any of that. There's a scene where you kill a character that was important to you growing up, and the main character (referred to as The Boy, among other things) doesn't even have a shot of him reacting. There's very little reference to the dead character beyond that despite him being an somewhat important character to many of the people in the main cast. The game pretends that alignment is some big thing, but it doesn't even come into play in the finale moments of the game. I played a good character the entire time until the Lost Chapters post-game and then I just decided to kill people because it was easier and I was pretty bored of the game at that point. Narratively the only difference seems to be with your actions during pivotal moments, and the game seemed like it couldn't care less if I killed 0 or 1,000 innocents up to that point.

The combat here is just atrocious. It's very literally just mash X, but sometimes you hold it if all of your attacks are being blocked. Enemies can block your attacks and hit you back, and generally when an enemy attacks there isn't enough of a tell for you to block in reaction, so you'll just end up getting hit. Some enemies' attacks go through blocks anyway, so blocking rarely seemed worth it. Late into the game, it feels like Lionhead realized how awful the combat is and instead just figured players would realize that the best way to beat combat sections is to just spam X and then heal whenever your health is low with no regard to what the enemy is even doing. The combat is frankly the worst part of the game, and it's so annoying that Fable puts so much time into doing combat.

I didn't do much of the auxiliary content primarily because I was used to the way you do it in Fable 3, although I also just wasn't very interested in it in this game. There's a renown system where the more things you do the more people in the world go "Oh man The Boy is so hot and cool and good at stuff," but you get so much renown from just doing the story quests that it never felt worth it to go out of my way to do these other quests. I tried to rent out a couple of houses, but I have no idea if that even ended up working. It doesn't really matter because the only things I bought the entire time were healing items, and you get more than enough money from the Arena and other story quests later on that it doesn't even seem worth it to find other revenues for income.

The layout of the world is uninteresting and confusing, and the game encourages you to use fast travel to such an absurd degree that I could not tell you the layout of any part of this game besides that the Lookout connects pretty easy to South Bowerstone. Everything else is a blur because you rarely have to actually walk anywhere unless it's in a quest zone, and when doing that I'm just fixed on the waypoint on the map telling me where to go and where enemies are so I can avoid any combat.

Fable is such a weird game, and I don't know that I even dislike it. The entire time I was playing this, I kept thinking to myself, "man, this really makes me want to play Fable 3." I haven't played 2 yet, although I know people like that one a lot. Fable 3 just feels like it saw what Fable 1 did that people found interesting (the auxiliary content) and put more time into that, and instead made the combat power-trippy by having enemies take fewer hits. Fable 1 laid great bones for a franchise, and I'm very curious to try Fable 2, replay 3, and hopefully hear new information on 4. God bless you, Peter Molyneux.

It's a very basic game that I played as a kid on iOS. Bought it recently and had as much fun as I remember having then, although that fun waned hard after about an hour. Maybe get this if it's on sale ever? Parts of it are better than Game Dev Tycoon (which came out 3 years later. Not sure why Backloggd says this game came out in 1996 when it directly references the Wii.), but some parts are less enjoyable. I'd like to see a second iteration of either game that borrows from the other, as I think a good Game Dev Simulator is still yet to be released.

The last time I played this game was 2012. Over 2 days I beat it again in 2021. I think any gripes I've had with it in the past are solved by engaging with as little side content as possible. The world of OoT is largely unenjoyable and the rewards for exploration are unrewarding. That said, the NPCs usually have something interesting to say, at least post-time skip, which makes the world feel slightly lived in, although the majority of Hyrule feels far more gamey than some of the later titles. The dungeons are some of the best in Zelda, and the bosses are either really fun or really boring. OoT 3D offers a lot of great QoL improvements over both the original and the majority of Zelda games. I think OoT is most interesting and enjoyable if viewed as a sort of Zelda 1 Remake; many required items are pretty unintuitive to acquire, but the addition of 21st century graphics allows there to be some worldly indication that you do need to blow up a wall or something. Despite the criticisms of this review, I really, really had a lot of fun playing OoT 3D this weekend. The core game is easily one of the best Zelda games to date, so as long as you ignore as much optional content as possible you'll enjoy this game as well.

FF1 & 2 are both NES JRPGs, which means that they are obtuse, grindy, and generally annoying to play. There are actually a lot of differences between the two games, with FF1 being a very traditional JRPG with the twist of literally no story until the final boss gives you a bit of a lore dump and then the end credits tell you the rest of the story which was actually pretty cool and really charming. FF2 decided to try and do something different by making an NES JRPG even worse of an experience by making you backtrack back to the starting town after you did literally anything, as well as forego traditional leveling for levels in every single aspect you possibly imagine, which actually sucks and is awful. They imposed way more story into FF2, much to its detriment. Instead of being charming, it's incredibly annoying and boring until the last hour or so, where it gets kinda cool, but by that point I was so incredibly annoyed with this experience that I just wanted it to be over. Both games did some cool things, but overall I would say do NOT play these games if you value your time at all, or give a single shit about not hating yourself for going through this.

I remember when this came out. I was really excited. "Oh boy," I thought to myself at like 12 years old. "A new 2D Sonic game but Sonic looks like from the games I like!" And then everyone said it sucked ass and so I never played it. Well, I played it today. It's really short, which is probably why the $/hour crowd was so pissed. It's got some fun ideas but unfortunately only half of the game is good. When the game is like two hours long as most, half of that time being annoying isn't a good sign. What is good here is really good. The first world is like any Sonic game, which is always solid. The last world is fun and fast paced, which is good. The middle two worlds are slogs, although they do have some really neat ideas. Unfortunately, those neat ideas don't save the otherwise obnoxious or boring level design. The bosses are mostly pretty fun, and Sonic having the new-age homing attack makes up a little bit for Sonic feeling like shit otherwise. Decent game, but don't bother playing it when there are ostensibly better 2D Sonics out there. Also, the game looks like complete garbage on PC. Not sure if that was a resolution thing or what, but holy cow.