a deeply upsetting experience. perfectly captures the feeling of bitter nostalgia - reminiscing over awful times. there are stories in this that are so beautiful it's absolutely insane.

could easily see this in 5 stars but i'm not sure how i feel about the way this game treats death. the core message feels like it's about accepting death, but it falls into a kinda common trope i see where the deaths are pointless and preventable. this isn't a huge fault but it does make me like the game a bit less. high recommendation though.

I had virtually no interest in cars before playing this, but I wanted something with good graphics for my shiny new PS5 and heard the haptic feedback in this game was incredible. That all ended up being true, but GT7's hardcore (to me) adherence to realistic physics and tuning is primarily responsible for me getting into cars (guess who knows how to change their brake pads and oil now...). It took me about a year of playing a couple races every week or two to "beat" the single player mode. I think treating this very casually was the way to go. Binging it would have been tedious.

That being said, the constant nudging towards spending real money on this game feels terribly out of place. Requiring this game to be always-online in the first place is ridiculous. Too bad modern AAA trends have infected their way into this.

I hear the original score for the older games goes hard. I ended up turning the music off entirely. At least the PS5 has Spotify support.

Melee is the greatest competitive video game ever made, and it was by mistake. This game is so good, if casuals did not know the competitive scene existed, they would never complain about it. Melee gets hate for being popular and liked, which I've never understood.

If you break it down at a game level, it x2's everything smash 64 had to offer. Larger Cast, Stage list, Item list, Single Player and Multiplayer offerings... trophies even. The list just goes on and on for improvements made between 64 and Melee.

Melee is so fascinating to me because its hard for me to find individual flaws in a game so deep. Sure you can complain about balance... which maybe affects 1% of people who've actually touched melee since release.

People point to Brawl being the best casual Smash game and I do have to agree, but Brawl only got there because it was able to build off melee, same way Melee built off of 64. Brawls subspace, does not exist without the success of Melee's adventure mode.

Melee now has some of the best online play any fighting game currently has. The rollback netcode from Slippi truly elevates melee even further into the GOAT status.

In my opinion, Melee is the GOAT of fighting games, and perhaps even games in general.