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.

Omega Ruby is pretty good Pokemon. As someone who doesn't really enjoy Hoenn games, something about OR really clicks with me. It fixes a lot of issues I have with Hoenn, specifically with some dungeons, although it stills has HMs and falls into the newer Pokemon trap of being a tad hand-holdy (albeit not as much as other games released in mid-late 2010s). Delta Episode is mostly just exposition, but the music in the game is freaking sick and flying to space to fight Deoxys was something I didn't expect at all when I originally played the game. Because it's a Gen 6 game, OR isn't particularly challenging, although I did also only use Blaziken and Latios (I wasn't in the mood for a challenge, honestly). Honestly my team choice didn't seem to matter much, as by OR Gamefreak still hadn't figured out how to properly handle new Exp. Share scaling. The more fleshed out characters/world of Gen 6 Hoenn is a welcome change, as original Hoenn felt like they tried to do too much in some areas and did shockingly little in others. Good game that I like especially because it's in my favorite Gen and is a remake of a game I didn't particularly enjoy initially.

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.

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.

I played it back in like 2013 or something originally and boy did I play the heck out of it then. Just went back to it today and man, it's as good as ever. The soundtrack is great, the art is phenomenal, the gameplay is as crisp as I remember. It's super short, beat it on normal this playthrough in just under 26 minutes. It seems really inspired by Mega Man almost to a fault at some points. There are a fair few annoyingly difficult jumps where if you don't do them just right you're instantly killed and have to restart the level. Fortunately, the levels are insanely short so that's never too big an issue. Plus, the music keeps going when you die rather than restart every time which is a nice change from some other games in the genre that most people might not really think about. Good game, I love Gunman Clive.

Pushmo has a surprising amount of content, although that isn't saying a whole lot when 3 of the 11 worlds are almost entirely tutorial worlds with another third being extremely trivial. The fun of Pushmo mostly starts after you get to world 8 or 9 because at that point you actually have to use your brain. Unfortunately, the main gimmick of Pushmo isn't super fun or rewarding. Completing a pushmo never felt like it was really worth my time. This game works best if you play it for a couple puzzles a day, as anything more than that is a little obnoxious. Thankfully, the game itself is super cute visually and the mural worlds are fairly enjoyable if mostly not very difficult. It isn't a bad game by any means, but there are surely better puzzle "platformers" out there.