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.

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.

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.

Halo 2 is a funny game. The story is just as insane as the first. Normal alien shit, but this time you know there will be zombies. But oops, now there's an eldritch beast underwater that teleports Master Chief and his new friend Arbiter the alien to stop Halo from firing again. Arbiter does, and Master Chief doesn't do much in the overall story despite most of the missions being Master Chief levels.

Gameplay-wise, Halo 2 improves so much upon Halo 1. It's got dual wielding, more weapons (I think), more vehicles (I think), you can board enemy vehicles and beat them up or hijack, the campaign is longer and you play as multiple characters. Arbiter lays the groundwork for armor abilities in Reach with the active camo. The SMG sucks and has way too much recoil even with console's absurd aim assist, but the battle rifle is cool and fun.

The campaign levels are a mixed bag. Environments tend to look pretty cool if a little too Halo-y. But it's the second in the series, so it's fine. Some of the areas within levels tend to blend together way too much and I ended up accidentally backtracking after a big fight because I got turned around and thought I was going the right way only to walk for a few minutes before stumbling upon some bodies I had already killed, then had to hightail it back the opposite direction. Still, there were plenty of fun sections in levels. The one level where you're riding this big hunk of space metal through the ocean and can board other big hunks of space metal and beat up aliens was very engaging and made me feel like a Master Chief.

I think this game is pretty solid and can definitely see why people might consider this the best Halo, although it isn't for me in large part due to playing on console. No idea how console shooters are even still a thing. Aiming with a stick is just not my bag anymore. I tried to play on MCC, but the game crashed mid-level one too many times for me and caused audio issues with other programs on my computer.

The first three worlds are extremely easy to the point where I was referring to this game as "literally for toddlers." The last three worlds shift between "literally for toddlers" and "annoying trial-and-error." The moment to moment platforming is nothing special. The best part of the game is getting 3rd Gear because holding the button and hitting guys actually feels satisfying. Getting 3rd Gear is also the worst because you usually have it for so long that you get to used to it, and then it resets you back to 1st Gear every level. It's a neat idea to have the same kind of progression every level, but ultimately I didn't feel that it added much. There was maybe one time any exploration ended in me going "Oh, I need to go back and find 2nd/3rd Gear because I can't progress." If there was more of that, maybe the game would've been more fun. It also does that platforming thing where some bosses are fought in completely different ways than you'd be used to from playing the game for hours prior. One of them is a maze that you navigate by flying, which is kinda cool, but the flying controls just aren't very good. The fish boss was fine, but it suffered from being way too simple (like the entire game up to that point). Overall, it's just not a super enjoyable game and I don't think you should pick it up if you're not really curious what that one assist trophy in Brawl is about.