Alto's Adventure makes me wonder if endless-runner games - even absent of the predatory microtransaction bullshit that plagues this genre - just have an inherent harmfulness to them that you have to actively resist when designing them. Sure Alto's Adventure never once asked for me to give it money but even despite this addiction loops are still baked so deeply into the game's core, so many little aspects that try to make you compulsively, instinctively start 'one more run' until suddenly you're ten more runs deep, deeply cynical, hollow design that wants you to give up your agency. It is less rotten that its brethren, and even has moments where it is legitimately pleasant to play, but I still think this game's attitude towards its players is just unforgivable.

Outer Wilds is the best video game I have ever played. It's breath-taking visuals, brilliant world building, and a soundtrack that I still listen to regularly years after finishing it, all come together to create a profound and unforgettable experience. It's a game that can really only be experienced once, and I can do nothing more than insist that you play it entirely blind, as there is not a single game out there that can truly capture the feeling of all-consuming and profound ecstasy that is derived from playing Outer Wilds. This is a must play, and my favourite video game of all time.

If The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of The Wild hadn't been such an impeccable reimagining of the series, if it had been just slightly less tight with its controls, if the atmosphere and melancholy were just a little less palpable, Outer Wilds would likely be my favorite game of all time. Honestly, there must exist a world in which that's the case. Maybe this one, sometimes, allows its fabric to stretch and give just enough to allow Outer Wilds its (absolutely earned) place atop that list.

Outer Wilds maybe changed my life. Outer Wilds is the moment Natalie Portman plays The Shins for Zach Braff, but without all of the modern cringe we have all silently but unanimously decided to level against Zach Braff. It's a puzzle box where the puzzle is the riddle of existence itself, and the answer is a resounding, beautiful, perfect hope that maybe what we do matters. Maybe the people we love have value to an uncaring universe, simply because we love them. Maybe our tiny, fleeting creations, if given the chance, actually do contain the worlds that we imagine them to hold. Maybe the right words, the right voice, the right moment, could save us all. Maybe life, uh, does find a way, and maybe, if we’re lucky, we can be a part of it, just for a moment. It's whatever House Of Leaves is about, but with hope as its essential ingredient instead of nihilism. This is a game that I want to share with everyone I have ever loved.

the ultimate smooth brain game mixed with the ultimate galaxy brain game

Tunic starts out with a simple premise: it's like an old Zelda, but ~different~. it's purposefully more cryptic, its combat and design more like dark souls, and its whimsy is more whimsical than its influences. this charm pulls you in, but the idea that there's something more to the world keeps you going through the more "where do i even go/what do i even do" parts.

the chests and walls hidden by the isometric camera are fun, a repurposing of old classics. the language of the game is genius, a joy to solve. the deeper secrets are the same, another delicious treat to stumble upon in your own way. even as i finished the game, i KNEW that there were still more bigger mysteries to solve, but i had my fun with Tunic and i knew it was time to break the cycle.

an absolute joy

Policy

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The manual mechanic is amazing but this game really falls apart in the 3rd act (the ghost arc) because they nerf your character, but the issue is the first pickup you get after beating the cathedral is stamina, when I think it probably should have been health or defense since the enemies on other areas kill you in like 2 hits and might give you a false sense of confidence you can kill the final boss, wasting all your materials in the process. The poison mechanic also sapping max health is silly, but it's especially silly they through it on the final boss' second phase as well. Meaning if you don't have gas mask equip you are just going to be brutalized, which sucks especially hard if you waste all your resources on the 1st phase only to go grinding for more. There's other issues to like the stamina UI being too small and out of the way, when the penalty for running out is you cant dodge until it refills to full. The sword hitbox feels too small so you can't really get close on enemies either. So you're probably going to die a bunch, but I don't know why they bothered with the currency loss death mechanic if they were going to have the numbers be so small. It just feels like its there to be trendy and try and build arbitrary tension when me losing 20 Bits means literally nothing to me. In fact at any point you could just grind and I imagine if you just grinded for 10 minutes you would make as many bits back as you lost throughout the whole game without pickups. Its just a strange choice, though I do appreciate it staggers enemies and bosses on pick up so it has some utility there. But as a result of the messy and unappealing combat design I turned No Fail mode on a few times without feeling too bad about it, and honestly I would urge you to do the same if you're feeling worn out.

The music is also strangely exhausting for progressive ambient most of the songs seem to be fighting and distracting themselves from pacing piano jittering back and forth like a keychain. There's exactly 1 song I feel nailed it and its the most intense song in the game, The Siege because the piano interludes actually feel more threatening, you have no clue what this giant machine is about to do next, so your holding your breath and the music halts with you. In general they nailed the Siege fight to such an extent that it's almost worth playing for that moment alone, but the music outside of it is just irritating. There's no intensity or sense of direction. Imagine somebody blasts Satie's Gymnopédies in your ear while your trying to play Zelda. The confusion and general inability to focus because of the twinkling aimless chords is kind of a sinkhole on my patience with the entire game. Other people may like it, but it just left me fatigued.

It's funny seeing people refer to all the 'puzzles' in the game, because sure there are puzzles in the post game (most of them amount to Konami Code gimmicks from my understanding). But there isn't really many before that at least I would probably refer to them more as environment gimmicks than puzzles. Not in a negative sense, just the fact that exploring an area to flip 1 way switches is not really my idea of a puzzle. Although you could refer to the map interpretation and general book as well as a meta puzzle for the practicalities of the game, in my case that primarily just boiled down to reading maps and figuring out what spot in the dark corner I missed to go forwards.

I thought the book manual itself being in a different language was incredibly unique, I like that the book is so incredibly useful at every phase in the game and its really nice to look at and see as your protagonist starts scribbling stuff in as you play. As a central gimmick of the game this in particular is EXACTLY what is going to keep me somewhat fond on it despite all my drawbacks. This manual was so intricately designed because it feels exactly like one of those incredibly useful instruction manuals you would find inside a box of your favorite games, but with nintendo magazine style secrets already there. It takes a lot of the design philosophies of these often discarded and ignored pieces of gaming and embellishes the memory of it. Not to mention how brilliantly to scale the maps are, this game somehow didn't have to 'cheat' on your location in a 2D rendering of the 3D space. I feel like it's worth dwelling on just why this is so beautiful, for one it actively reminds you that the world is a game in a way that engages you further, it becomes a toy, something to play around with. The nostalgia trigger here is also great because this is exactly how this would have worked for somebody playing through the first zelda game, flip from screen to book back and forth SHOULD dissuade you from the game as an immersive space but for some reason it doesnt. In a way just playing a game without any physical intervention can be draining and create ennui poisoned tunnel vision. When you treat a computer game as a primary object to get lost in it can be something that weakens or frusterates you. An in game manual gives attention to that and I think comments on an incredibly valid nostalgia of that. I don't think this is an accidental piece of the puzzle, overtime our relationship with games have turned more into digital product for consumption, getting a key instead a running a disc, having it in a systematized inventory steam folder or itchio page with your dozens or hundreds of other purchases, etc. With this small central gimmick, Tunic dares to comment on all of that, and how it can in a sense be preserved by having a utilizable 'guidebook' within the confines of the game. But it does it through doing the concept justice through its tactile pleasantry rather than condemning digitization outright (although it does do this through the quarry energy enslavement reveal, I doubt people are going to pick up on the metaphor outright). Overall I don't think Tunic as a text hates digitization so much as it simply ask what is missing or what is sacrificed in the process, and how do we go about trying to get it back? Encrypting the book with a second language is the touch it needed to keep it balanced between this childlike memory and not just making the whole game easy/disenchanting the memory (after all we never read ALL of those instruction manuals anyway we just liked how they looked).

The main drawback I have about the language mechanic is that when you go to pick something up a non diagetic popup is asking you if you want to pick the thing up in its language, but I feel like you could just replace this popup with the phrase 'pick up/buy?' in our language and lose nothing. It's really more distracting because when I see that sort of popup I assume the protagonist is the one having the thought, and I also assume we interpret the same language by the design. So why is there this other language obscuring the characters own mind?

The lack of dialogue works highly in the games favor because how ultimately simple the story it was trying to tell is. Had the merchant I ran into said DID YOU KNOW THIS LAND IS LOCKED IN RUIN FOR 1000 YEARS BY A GREAT KING I would have been annoyed. Instead the merchant is an eldrich dragon skeleton who says nothing.

I mentioned in my Hollow Knight insight I wouldn't have a great time combing that game for secrets, but I'd much rather comb that game than this one. Some of the puzzles seem dense and a lot of secret chest being hidden in dark corridors is even less engaging in a 3d space. There's no way to mentally just mark off in your head you searched an area already in 3d space because there could just be a prompt you missed, it would be like losing your keys in your house, no matter where you think you looked its possible its still there, its a very sickly feeling combined with the lack of indication. Like, there are a bunch of dark staircases I missed in front of me trying to progress the game normal, no way am I going to be asked to uncover all the secrets.

The only other thing I have to say is this games post game content unpleasantly feels like its begging you to play it, you finish and get after an incredibly grueling bossfight an ending where you get chained up, only to tease you that you 'missed X pages' after. I get the general mood of the game is somber but it feels way too cute to leave you on that kind of note. Maybe I would have felt better just having my character be able to walk away as the world crumbles or something...

Wait, why do I feel that way? Oh yeah, it's because it's exactly what Hyper Light Drifter did! That game handles its cozy ambience and moments of severe melancholy way better than this one, and also has a world with no talking. Let me end on a good note, I'll throw a few more recs out:

If you would like a difficult game with a challenging but fun puzzlecore post game, try Environment Station Alpha or go play an actual puzzle game that develops concepts like Baba is You or The Witness.

If you want to try and play an emotionally difficult but artistically beautiful experience with much better dodge functionality try Lucah: Born of a Dream (I also have to finish this one).

If you're a furry try Dust an Elysian Tail, a fairly easy but incredibly cute voice acted experience.

Hope those suggestions balance out my curmudgeon attitude towards Backloggd indie darling of the month :3

Surprisingly smart little game! Uses Link's Awakening's skeletal structure as a somewhat perfunctory platform to host Tunic's core puzzle-solving strengths, which come from the way it delicately divulges new information to the player for them to intuit and patch together. The in-game manual conceit really is an enlightened touch, what a wonderful way to avoid tutorialisation by lightly suggesting mechanics and prompts in a freeform way. A new star in my eye forms every time a game nudges me into realising a shortcut or mechanic has ALWAYS been there, I just wasn't aware yet. The combat serves as an occasional hurdle against progress in a way I just found detracting to the experience. For as rough as it is, it neither needs to be as present nor as bafflingly demanding lol.

Still, I enjoyed this a lot. The closest comparison I can think of on a whim would be Fez, another game filled with micro and macro puzzles that near-wordlessly demand intuition and perception on the part of the player. Lifeformed is on the 1s and 2s for this soundtrack btw! Mostly just ambiance without the Dustforce killer, but I missed that guy.

Thriving off the pastiche of early morning 90s anime, somewhere between Astro Boy, Pokémon and One Piece, Mega Man Legends wears the sanguine smile of a lost decade of anime, a face recognizable to only the most jaded of despondent 20-something weebs and old-head otakus. Conceptually light, the game mostly treads the same footing as it’s inspiration: our plucky protagonists crash-land on a distant island, foil bumbling sky pirates, and unearth treasure and secrets aplenty in the name of fortune and getting back home. It’s simple, it’s clean, it’s the foundation for a generation of anime writing, but like the greatest baby anime, the concept isn’t what sells you on Mega Man Legends: It’s simply a gateway to some stellar vibes.

Driven by low-stakes and a peaceful atmosphere, the game brings to mind the feeling of waking up just in time to catch Pokémon before you run off to school, the emotions bound to that half-hour slice, the hominess of the entertainment you grow up with. Like an audio-visual security blanket, Mega Man Legends is nostalgia given form, a work built not for overshadow competition and breaking new ground, but to provide an experience that felt immediately familiar, yet uniquely new.

Even compared to its predecessors, Mega Man Legends sits in sharp contrast; as if in reaction to the lethal edge and melodrama of the Mega Man X series, a story of betrayal, loss, death, and general misery, Legends expounds boundless optimism in the face of adversity, unbreakable bravery in the face of crushing odds, and a bunch of goofy doofuses filling a cast of instantly lovable faces. If anything, the game designed to take advantage of the new technology afforded to the PlayStation feels like a much more genuine reconciliation of the tone of the original Mega Man series, while the game designed to retain the old-school fan base was deeply tinged by the style and aesthetic of gritty, grimy 90s OVAs and anime.

Talking about the mechanics in a game like this feels pointless: You are there, without question, to experience the story, meet the characters, and appreciate the world the game has developed. The gameplay itself exists as a method to feed that experience to you; while deeply dated, and reflective of the past of game design in its philosophy, it stands less as a foundational flaw of the game and more part of the overall story. In an inversion of John Carmack’s infamous quote, the gameplay is expected to be there, but it’s not important.

It’s difficult to speak uncritically about a game with such an established cultural relevance, and it’s equally difficult to find something meaningful to say. For me, Mega Man Legends is the epitome of a bygone era of anime, a touchstone on a generation of anime that inspired artists, writers and directors through the present day. It’s watching Yu-Gi-Oh as you wake up, it’s catching Digimon during a lazy Sunday. It’s emblematic of nostalgia as an idea, and how it relates to the media we approached as children, and how those tastes shape what we love and appreciate now.

I’ve played a lot of Mega Man games in the last six months, and even when they start to show the signs of burgeoning narrative ambition in the X series, those games are too held up by their own stupidity and refusal to consider the implications of their own worldbuilding for me to say that they’re really About anything. By the year 1997 we’re at a clear point where the X series has established characters, sort of, and a jumble of recurring ideas, kind of, but there’s no real coherence to anything narratively, no actual throughline to that world. And that’s fine with me, it’s really not what I’m here for, it’s mostly something I focus on a lot in my writing about these games because that stuff takes an ever-growing presence in these games to thus far no payoff.

But that IS also what makes Mega Man Legends feel like such a breath of fresh air when it hits the scene on the Mega Man timeline. It’s not just the radical directional shift in gameplay this one adopts (though I do really enjoy that too), and I wouldn’t call it an entirely aesthetic thing either – no, this game is obviously one of the most beautiful and pleasant to look at in the history of the medium, but Mega Man has always had exceptional aesthetics, it’s the one thing that’s virtually unassailable across every iteration of the series so far. For me I think the thing that’s so immediately remarkable about Legends is the clear and deliberate focus on the voice of the game and the characters, something that has never been present in the franchise before. The series has a lot of CHARACTER, but it doesn’t really have characterS, right? Even X and Zero, the closest thing to fleshed out guys we have so far are kind of shallow and stupid caricatures of cardboard cutouts. Legends may not win any awards for MegaMan Volnutt’s personality but the fact that this guy has such a strongly defined voice and wants and, most importantly, that the cast of people around him is much more strongly defined and central to the game than he is, makes the game stand out immediately from its parent series.

Because as much as Mega Man Legends is a run n gun 3D dungeon crawler with light RPG elements it’s equally if not moreso one of those cool mid 90s to mid-00s Japanese games where you don’t have a lot of clearly defined goals (or if you do they’re not really urgent) and you kind of just vibe with all the side characters in a small semi-open world. This is a hard thing to describe but I feel like you know what I’m talking about right? Games like Majora’s Mask, Shenmue, Chulip, most mid-period Harvest Moons, maybe Chibi-Robo? The kind of game where when you were a kid it was easy to ignore the main plot and just chill out. I never played Mega Man Legends as a kid but it would have fit right in with that collection of “games that aren’t walking sims that I forced into that mold because I’ve always been like this I guess.”

This small island and it’s little city of comically fastidious bureaucrats and fantasy policeman who are just inept enough to be funny and unthreatening and workaday tradespeople baking bread and selling clothes and operating tv stations is outrageously detailed, full of little secrets and stuff that help you fill up your health bar during unexpected boss fights in normally safe zones or crafting materials that let your friend research new weapons for you, but it’s full of entirely superfluous stuff too, seemingly just for the sake of character. Multiple buildings and storefronts let you enter and are full of NPCs with bespoke dialogue that have no practical in-game benefit to you, with a fully modelled interior to explore. Lots of NPCs will give Volnutt a little yes or no question to answer for no reason, it’s cute! There are sidequests too but they’re usually stuff like help out the local kid gang with building up their clubhouse by finding a hammer and a saw, or hang out with a local sick kid, or find something this lady could use to add a little splash of color to her landscape painting. It’s a relaxed atmosphere, a game full of friendly people being generally nice, full of unthreatening villains and bright blue skies. The vibes, as they say, are immaculate here. I do want to shout out the voice acting in particular, which strikes that Saturday morning cartoon vibe perfectly but because it’s 1997 there’s not really an entrenched anime voice actor industry that just defaults into all of these roles, so you get a bunch of low budget Canadian tv people doing these voices instead in a way that gives this game some incredible character. MegaMan Volnutt himself is actually voiced by a thirteen-year-old boy rather than an adult woman doing an Anime Kid voice it’s a really distinct sound from anything you would hear today.

The gameplay is pretty slick too. I assume this is an unpopular statement here, I feel like it’s easy to see any game with tank controls and be like ah it’s clunky it’s old it doesn’t feel good or intuitive, and fuckin surprise surprise here comes ina crawling out of her well to defend an old game’s aged elements but hear me out a little bit. Anything that feels unintuitive only feels that way because we don’t have muscle memory for it, right? I have two really distinct memories from my childhood of Adult Non-Gamers pretending to take an interest in my video game at a family gathering and just being unable to conceptualize the basic movement controls of Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and Dragon Ball Z Legacy of Goku II. These are not, these aren’t difficult games to parse, right, it’s just that someone who has literally never interacted with a game until her 50s doesn’t know how to do it. It’s fine!

So having the weird control scheme it has doesn’t automatically make Mega Man Legends unworthy, right? There’s more to it. You have to consider the game that’s built around those controls, and I think MML is pretty well constructed. If anything, the game is tuned a little too easy, with most enemies absolutely confounded by the very simple strategy of a nonstop circle strafe around them, which will serve you like 90% of the time. But by and large I found that enemies were placed pretty thoughtfully, platforming challenges were designed with the fact that your control over your character and the camera is slow and limited, and in general things are designed in such a way that I rarely felt that I was wrestling with the controller, it all felt really well done to me. There are a lot of movement options in this game too, within a couple hours of starting I was really just zooming the fuck around.

The ending of Mega Man Legends isn’t a triumph or a tragedy or a big sequel hook or anything. It has all of those thing but those aren’t the focus. The ending is the quiet few minutes where the car is getting packed up at the end of a trip and you have a moment to say goodbye. You’re encouraged to take one last lap around town, where all the important characters and sidequest NPCs are scattered around to let you know they’re gonna be thinking about you, and they appreciate the little stuff you’ve done for and with them over the last 15-or-so hours. It feels right. I did sing the praises of the dungeon crawling a bit, and I did like it, but the core of the game is fucking around, competing in game shows, helping out a pregnant woman, adopting cats, thwarting the world’s least threatening bank heist. It feels right to spend the real time saying goodbye to the stuff that matters, and spend relatively little on the actual plot stuff which is mostly pretty limp. Just like meeeee I’m very sick right now if this review is incoherent that's why okay I’m gonna go take a nap game good

"This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game."

man. this was so bad that it made me start getting really annoying about gaming remakes on twitter which I'm continually embarrassed by, but it's hard for me to not be cynical about this thing on a level greater than 'i don't like what they did to a game that i think is good' bc to me it speaks to almost everything I find frustrating about the games industry at the moment

and like, I don't like to be miserable about media that isn't actively harmful! so what a shame that this remake feels actively miserable about the original game itself. it feels like the gaming zeitgeist at large sometimes have to be told when they're allowed to like old games instead of giving them the sweeping dismissal we generally give to anything older than a decade. if a game hasn't had a popular youtube essay about why it's good, actually, then it needs a remake to be playable in the modern age, right? jim ryan got absolutely demolished for asking why anyone would want to play a ps2 game nowadays, but we'll still eat this up because it has pretty lighting or w/e?

anyway to actually speak about the game itself, I think a lot of really questionable details in its presentation were largely overlooked when it came out. most people agreed that the new UI kinda sucks, but I've seen much less focus given to the janky facial animations (which will look worse in a few years than the original's lack of animation does now btw, there's a reason fromsoft straight up didn't bother) and questionable cutscene lighting and direction. a lot of scenes that from's team evidently gave a lot of care to in the original, like the dragon cutscene in 1-1 and king allant's entrance, look flat and lifeless in comparison - perhaps lit more realistically but cinematographically botched and much less effective. NPCs emote too much when they don't need to, and too little when they do, and every edge on most of the character designs has been sanded down to an unreasonable degree. the voice acting is a huge step down, the animation is all more weightless, etc, etc

fromsoftware are such an unlikely success story, and demon's souls has a weird place in their catalogue where it often gets dismissed as a kind of janky dark souls prototype instead of being taken on its own merits, so it kinda sucks to see it finally given mainstream attention only when its original paint job is stripped away in favour of something that exists primarily to show off the ps5's ability to push polygons. fromsoft's name isn't even attached to this in public, the vast majority of their original work taken out and replaced with presentation that's completely detached from the original's quiet, subversive style, despite bluepoint insisting that it's the same because they kept the gameplay intact or w/e

anyway this review is way too long and idk if i'm even allowed to post this here when it's so irrelevant to the game itself but I think this thing's mixed reception should prompt a lot of us to reconsider how we think about criticising games. is it an example of obnoxious purism when someone criticises the sweeping change in architectural style here, or the brighter colour palette? personally I think we should appreciate those details a lot more even before a new studio arrives to replace them wholesale, I have a lot more fun getting nerdy about the little things in games than I do trying to not be pretentious about them, and I think the push for better game preservation is allowed to point this stuff out without being shot down for nitpicking or w/e

(mask off, I think bluepoint are artistic terrorists and sotc ps4 was just as bad as this! give me my atmospheric haze or give me death, cowards)

cannot say i am particularly enamored with the idea that we should frame this discussion in any way that pretends it is not ultimately a willful net loss for games preservation. the idea that in order to aggressively push hardware a development team was enlisted to resurrect a long forsaken ip, in the process fundamentally misunderstanding the majority of its artistic sensibilities (sometimes aggressively so) to showcase a console’s power rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. and there’s potent irony here because we must also remember that in essence sony is banking on from softwares death cult to launch a console cycle for the second time in a row now. recall the invective words of shuhei yoshida, 2009: 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' surely what is now a valuable ace in the sleeve for sonys financial strategy in the 9th generation of consoles onwards deserves more respect than this?

as an immediate contrast in the field of remakes, i’ll put forward that at the very least, ff7 is one of the most ubiquitous games of all time - to such a degree that altering its content and expanding on its themes in a rebuild-esque scenario is not only sensible, but appreciated. the same case is difficult to make for demon’s in my opinion.

perhaps bluepoints alterations, seldom rooted in any reverence for aesthetics but instead prioritizing largely perfunctory gameplay, are to your tastes. but they are not to mine. the original demon’s souls is an intensely difficult work to assess, litigate, and reconcile with, to be sure, but whatever your stance on it, it’s difficult to deny how exquisitely it worked with its limitations to fashion something that was entirely inspired and bold, yet quintessentially from software. none of that same evocative ethos is reflected here, and for these reasons i find bluepoint’s iteration extremely difficult to respect - doubly so because im in a position now of having twice been told to give bluepoint a chance on a remake, both times to personally and deeply unsatisfactory results. i only wish more folks had a convenient way of experiencing the original so they were free to pass their own judgments

The most important games for me are ones that seem to pop in to my world at the exact time that I needed them, and Pikmin is a strong example of one of those cases. The moment I was living under my own roof, during the summer before I started college, I felt like a completely different person. I never knew what life was like without the every minor decision or daily bit of minutia being judged with a harsh eye, and subsequent fear, and my first apartment changed all of that. Living alone started as a party, I spent money and time in ways I previously never could, but as the high of freedom wore off, something took it's place, legitimate independence. Local transportation would allow me to effectively perform walkabout's in every area that interested me growing up, and despite growing up in a single parent household, as an only child, this solitude was something different, a vast world that began to teach me thing's. And it was about a year in to this unique solitude that I found Pikmin.
This silly gamecube launch title has valuable lessons about finding peace with death, discovering the logic behind a seemingly harsh world, and most importantly to me, how to deal with being left alone with your own thoughts. I remember sitting in my car in a massive parking structure, before a big event I was involved with, trying to squeeze in a few extra minutes with Captain Olimar and the Pikmin, knowing how important his journey's would feel parallel to mine.
At the end of the day, this is a neat tech demo about a tiny guy fighting monsters, but for someone attempting to finding their own voice; critically, profesionally, and personally, there could be no better companion than Olimar, and no better game than Pikmin.