This being the first GameCube game I played I wanted to see if it held up 2 decades later and it did!
A unique and fun title starring Luigi which mixes comedy and humor into a weirdly well made spooky setting. The gameplay is fun, the music slaps, and its just short enough it doesn't outstay its welcome. Unfortunately the GameCube controller make some of boss battles awful, I'm not sure if it's my controllers or not but having to press the L button with just enough pressure where you actually spray water/fire/ice but not enough pressure where you instead shoot elemental balls was very annoying for the last few bosses.
Very Fun overall, highly recommend it as a must play Nintendo Title!

Being the follow up to OOT is a terrible burden, but Majora's Mask is successful in making another memorable game that will never be forgotten. However what also won't be forgotten is the horrible Goron controls, confusing requirements to progress, constant backtracking, and the confusing dungeon layouts. I enjoy this game I really do, but it has major faults in its design that make this less enjoyable than OOT. I played the majority of this replay without a guide, but a few times I was forced to look at one after spending an hour or two on certain sections that baffled me, Fierce Deity Link is goated regardless.
In terms of the atmosphere, unique mechanics, and the overall theme this game shines as a phenomenal experience.

Whoever convinced the higher ups at Nintendo to make Mario into paper and then also doubled down on the most ridiculous writing is an actual genius and I thank them everyday.
Paper Mario is a fantastic RPG that really holds it's own in Nintendo's library, if you removed the Mario element from the game it would still be great. The combat is turn based but forces you to be engaged at all times with small different quick time events which helps with the slow battles. The story is good fun and while not mind blowing, it's intriguing and a good time and the writing of side characters are amazing, genuinely every side character was memorable and good God the artstyle is so gorgeous.
The problem this game faces is the way they shove so many party members in your face so fast that you never have a chance to actually learn about them, nor do you use them all much outside of when the game forces you to use them so that you can beat an enemy that's on fire or made of stone and also the balance of enemies towards late game seem to just do loads of damage with attacks so fast you have a hard time defending with the action command.
This is just a great game, it's one of the few Mario games I really enjoy because it's different and unique from the 2D platformer he's known for.

This is a really boring game made to sell the gimmick device known as the Wii Zapper, development stories for this game make me so upset seeing as how the team wanted to make this game an extra story for Twilight Princess, but instead was forced to make a bare bones arcade shooter. Basically Link has a crossbow that shoots like a modern firearm... That's it.
Its not a fun game at all, there is no incentive to play the game past the first level as there is no actual boss battles, worthwhile upgrades, cosmetics, or anything to show progression other than "get big numbers."
I will say they have some variety having on rail sections, small movement sections, and "bosses" that just require you to shoot smarter, but that's about it. Hell even the music choices is off-putting, why is the Goron theme playing in Orden?
Whatever, at least links crossbow looks cool I guess and yes I did unfortunately play this with a Wii Zapper.

Ocarina of Time is without a doubt one of the greatest games ever made, it was a huge step in showing how creative and ambitious you can be with video games. Replaying this 2 and a half decades later is still a magical journey of fun, humor, and frustration.
The music and atmosphere is brilliant, the characters are fun and memorable, and the writing is interesting enough you'll be happy to read every bit of knowledge you can get your hands on.
The problems I have with the game are mostly due to how awful the N64 controller is to aim with, that and the combo of the water temple and shadow temple back to back with the use of the boots is exhausting to the point I had to set the game down half way through the shadow temple and wait a day or two before I felt like playing again.
There is so much to talk about why many others and I love this game that this review could turn into the first three entries of a Young Adult Novel franchise, so I'm not gonna do that.

I never played the original game, probably won't do this justice so I'll keep it short.

I feel I've figured out quite some things about life, as someone in their mid twenties. Even so, sometimes one cannot help but waver about what do they truly want, what truly is important to them and many other questions that strike our minds from time to time.

This game delves into these uncertainties and much more, on what gives us purpose and what keeps us going foward, what it truly means to be alive. It tells us that to live is to suffer, to bond, to forge memories that will make us what we are and we will keep forever, to accept what we cannot change and to change what we can. Always accompanied with the fateful reminder that to live is to die.

I feel like deep down most of us know this, even if we struggle to come to terms with it which is even harder in modern society, we are constantly told that only success regarding your ambitious career path or job can lead to a truly fulfilling life, but our hearts know otherwise.

In this game, you will accompany many people on their journey to find one's purpose and meaning, and while doing so finding your own. Rushing your way through days and months with an addictive calendar system, making sure to make the best out of every afternoon and evening to max every social link and social stat so you can enjoy the wonderfull characterization that this game offers. The soundtrack is breathtaking and I cannot overstate how much I appreciate how varied it is and how it accompanies so well the state of the game you are currently in.

The gameplay is fun, played it on hard difficulty even if I was playing on easy for a while, which made it boring, so I ended up going back to hard not to regret it.

The themes are all over the place, everything fits them in the game even if some style may have been lost with the remake.

I have always struggled with the concept of death, the death of others and my own. This game resonated with me on a very personal level and I will cherish my memories of it.

"The arcana is the means by which all is revealed. Celebrate life grandeur, it's brilliance, it's magnificence."

My only regret is not having played this back when i was a teenager.This game truly is an ode to life, and it's absolutely beautiful.

Ever been interested in the Persona series? Start with this one!

As a big fan of Persona 3, Reload was the game I was looking forward to the most in 2024 alongside Infinite Wealth, so I did the same as with IW and held off on watching trailers past the announcement one entirely to experience the changes for myself. When the release date came closer, I began to see more and more doomposting for Reload and even considered holding off on buying it because of how negatively this game was treated by others. I'm glad that didn't get to me in the end and I could form my own opinion of the remake of one of my favorite games.

First off, the presentation in Reload is amazing right off the bat, ranging from the upgraded artstyle to the dynamic menus and improved character models, it's just so very pleasant to look at. This also includes animations - the Ultimate moves of the characters look super cool. As someone who only ever really played Portable before, the upgrade in presentation was a huge point for me. Sure, the updated environmental design of the overworld is great, but the cherry on top are the revamped Tartarus blocks. The floors are no longer mere reskins with the same layout, now every block has a detailed new look and a different pattern. Tartarus changes don't stop here though, like the previous top-down camera has been turned into a proper third-person one, which I believe adds to the immersion a lot, despite being so seemingly insignificant at first. Furthermore, exploration is incentivized with mini-bosses being accessible in ordinary floors now alongside the addition of lucrative floor-specific events like locked or special chests. Can't forget the revamped Golden Hands in Reload either, as they provide a large amount of XP now (like in Persona 4) instead of dropping items. A great change for everyone who hated grinding and the new Great Clock random event can boost two of your teammates' levels on a whim, so no one has to fall behind! I believe the new Tartarus has something in store for everyone, so even if you were turned off by the gameplay in the original, giving it a second look might be worth it...

Voice acting in Reload is top notch. I don't share the somewhat popular sentiment of Yukari and Aigis sounding worse than their original counterparts at all, they're probably even my favorite new castings. That being said, personally I wouldn't say there's a single bad casting within the new voice actors, I enjoyed all of their performances. Emotional scenes got me tearing up several times, I got shivers during others. Not to disregard some of the original actors, but Reload really elevated some characters for me, just with their new performances (Yuko, Chidori and Fuuka are great examples). Also love how every social link is completely voiced now, it's a huge boost in immersion. As for social links in general, I'm glad the new Link Episodes exist, they're basically mini social links for the male party members and give you some insight into their life. A great way to add some interaction with them to the game without replacing the already existing social links! The SEES hangouts during nighttime also fulfill a similar role in giving your teammates more screentime without taking up meaningful time (considering the abundance of free time at night in P3), this also includes new events like several study sessions with the team. Those activities aren't just for fun though, you gain new passive abilities for the other members or gain extra knowledge points while studying with the others, the integration is seamless.

The new soundtrack is... good! Not much to say here, I like the remixes of the original songs and the new songs are bangers. Color Your Night is one of the very best vocal tracks in the series and It's Going Down Now still stays hype after listening to it over and over. Shoutout to the new remix of Changing Seasons.

There's a whole lot more to unpack about this game, but for the time being I have said everything that was on my mind. My thoughts are still pretty hazy, despite completing Reload hours ago, but I hope you could get something useful out of my review either way. As always, thanks for reading!

A great little collectathon you can beat in one sitting. The launch of Celeste 64 caught me entirely by surprise and the fact that this game was made in just a week is astonishing. Not much to say about it except that it's a lot of fun (despite the janky camera) and translates the gameplay elements of Celeste into 3D fairly well. Wish it was a bit longer, but I'm not really complaining since it was made in such a short time - maybe this concept will be fully realized one day if the reception is positive? Only time will tell.

Final stats (taken from the results screen):
🍓x25
💀x089
⏱47:55:455

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 is an action-adventure game focused on one of the most popular superheroes of all time. In this game, players can control two Spider-Men as they attempt to save New York.

As for the gameplay, I can confidently say it is near-perfect. Exploring New York as Spider-Man is truly enjoyable, and the fights against both regular enemies and bosses are incredibly fun. However, one drawback for me is certain parts of the game where you control Mary Jane or the two Spider-Men in their everyday lives.

The story serves as a sequel to the first game and its DLC featuring Miles Morales. In my opinion, the storyline is the best we've seen for these characters. The interactions between Peter Parker and Miles Morales, with Peter as the mentor and Miles as the apprentice, are amazing.

We're also talking about one of the most beautiful games on the PS5. The graphics are stunning! Simultaneously, we get a near-perfect representation of New York, and revisiting the city was delightful for me.

In summary, Marvel's Spider-Man 2 stands out as one of the most enjoyable games of 2023. It's my Game of the Year, even though there are other games that may be more ambitious. It's a perfect sequel that enhances everything we saw before, even with almost no innovations.

There seems to be a prevailing expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus establish dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.