Other than a few easily overlookable things, this is pretty much everything you could ask for in a remake of this game.

After well over a decade, it's about damn time we got a Paper Mario game that wasn't boring tripe with an identity crisis. Sure it's just a remake, but at least Intelligent Systems didn't screw it up and seems to understand why people love this game.

It is, for the most part, pretty much the same game with a lot of extra, subtle things that liven up everything. Characters have new animations for certain situations, there's a bunch of new music like themes for every partner, and characters make little Banjo Kazooie-esque noises when speaking. Only negative changes really are the 30fps (which really isn't that big of a deal) and not being able to skip through the text quickly. I'm pretty sure the latter might be because the game uses Origami King's engine which had the same text system. For the most part, it's a pretty faithful remake, about on par with the Super Mario RPG one.

Not much else to say. It's basically the definitive version of Thousand-Year Door. In other words, it's a better version of one of the greatest games of all time. Very much looking forward to seeing more and more people finally play this and understand why Paper Mario fans have been so frustrated for the past 15+ years.

Trying to replay Fallout 4 pissed me off enough to finally go back and actually finish this game. For the longest time, I found it borderline impenetrable due to its clunky and dated UI, but after actually taking the time to learn how things work, it's really not that bad.

The game is ultimately still very flawed. Some skills are basically worthless to the point where you have to wonder why they're even in the game. Certain weapons and armor are just straight up superior to others. Getting the Brotherhood of Steel power armor seems basically necessary to survive the end game battles. Once you've obtained the Plasma Rifle and leveled up your Energy Weapons skill, you've pretty much won the game. On top of that, the game is filled with various bugs, including the ending slides where somehow the Super Mutants destroyed multiple locations despite the fact that I both blew up the military base they were spawning from and the cathedral where The Master was controlling them from. Good to know that this series was a technical mess held together via Elmer's Glue and scotch tape even before Bethesda got their hands on it.

With that being said, it is extremely addicting once you start making some progress. Each location feels unique with their own quests that have to be solved. The characters feel real and the voice acting is definitely significantly better than the voice acting that would show up in the later Fallouts. Granted, there are very few NPCs that actually have voice acting. There's a very dark atmosphere and general feel of dread and looming destruction that you don't quite feel with the modern Fallouts either. The devs really put a lot of effort into making this feel like a truly fucked world.

Combat can be a little annoying, but you can just save scum pretty easily if you don't want to deal with dumb RNG. Companions are cool, and I like that Charisma affects how many can follow you at a time. Probably the only thing it's good for. You definitely do feel like you're progressing and getting stronger over the course of the game. There's nothing more satisfying than landing a crit that violently blows off a chunk of an enemy raider's torso. Death animations in general are great in this game. The silly dismemberment stuff can can happen in Fallout 3 and NV can be fun, but there's something about the animations in this that are way more cool.

Fallout 1 is a bit of a mess and has a lot of issues, but it certainly does leave an impression. It's very simple and feels pretty small, however the writing and replayability make up for it. I can see why Todd Howard, being the big CRPG guy he used to be back in the day, would be so heavily influenced by this and want to try his own hand at it. Kind of a shame how that eventually turned out. I guess becoming a massively popular franchise with some mediocre entries is still better than it dying on Brotherhood of Steel, a bad console exclusive that nobody played nor should ever want to play. Still, it would be nice to see another developer get the opportunity to step up to the plate and give us their own take on Fallout. Maybe something a bit closer to the first one.

Definitely not even close to as good as Super Princess Peach, but decent enough I guess.

A cute, mostly fun, mostly easy game that has weird moments of frustration due to unclear mechanics. It's very short too, but I can see a kid really enjoying this. I'm sure this'll be one of those games that younger gen z/gen alpha will look back on as a nostalgic "underrated gem" or something. The final boss was a nice little spectacle too I guess.

Admittedly, the best thing to come out of this game is more Peach art.

I was going to give this another shot, but I actually got so pissed off at this that I just gave up and quit. It is genuinely way worse than I remember it being.

Fallout 4 is slow, sluggish, and boring. Every action feels weird and delayed. The UI is among the worst I've ever experienced in a video game. Menus within menus, inconsistent buttons to get out of said menus, and I swear sometimes the game straight up drops button inputs.

For aiming to feel anything close to decent with a keyboard & mouse, you have to edit the ini files to disable mouse acceleration and make it so that vertical sensitivity isn't always half of horizontal sensitivity. The fact that this is even a thing in a 2015 game, well after PC gaming became more prominent, is fucking baffling to me. Options in general in this are impressively limited. You can't even change brightness settings or FOV in-game.

Exploring the world sucks because it's ugly and uninteresting. Everything is an ugly shade of brown, gray, or green and it all looks smeared together like someone took a shit in their hand and wiped it on a canvas. Enemies blend in with the environment too easily and love to hide behind corners, making most encounters a game of hide and fucking seek.

Skills and general RPG mechanics are gone. All you really have are perks, which leave much to be desired. You're pretty much required to get stuff related to guns and combat because so much of the game is a generic shootbang. Quests all just involve killing things. Most locations are just dungeons with things to kill and a treasure chest at the end. The honest truth is that this is basically a looter shooter in disguise as a Fallout game. What's bizarre about this is that the combat isn't even good. Like sure, the gunplay is technically better than the previous Fallout games, but I can't stand how this game feels. Something about the flow and feel of combat in this compared to 3/New Vegas really rubs me the wrong way.

I'll admit I do kind of like the crafting mechanics and the base building stuff. It's clunky, but you do get a good amount of freedom with it. Ultimately, it comes off as kind of pointless though.

I recall my first playthrough of this, I did almost drop it due to similar feelings. I don't know what happened, but I think I somehow managed to push myself to finish it and eventually got used to things. I don't think I have the ability to do that anymore. Used to think this game was merely mediocre, but now I think it just sucks.

Sometimes you go out of your comfort zone with a new game and discover something fresh you wouldn't have expected to enjoy. Other times your experience reinforces how violently you dislike something and makes you question why you even bothered. Animal Well was the latter for me. After wandering aimlessly to start I found myself in a multi-room puzzle that required some tricky platforming and switch flipping only to end up in a pitch-black room and died to a ceiling spike I didn't know was there or could even kill me. Discovering the last twenty minutes or so of progress had been lost and I would need to do this over again, I decided that was enough for me.

Does this make Animal Well a bad game? No. Is this an entirely fair critical analysis of the game? No. Was it sufficient enough to make me hate my time spent here and never want to pick this up again? Absolutely.

Basically the same game only prettier and with a ton of developer commentary that may or may not be interesting depending on how much you like listening to Jon Blow's voice (granted it's not just him at least). It also has some new levels too which is neat.

Like it or not, this was essentially one of the major indie games that initiated the indie boom that really kicked off in the 2010s. This along with stuff like VVVVVV, Super Meat Boy, World of Goo, Castle Crashers, Limbo etc really did substantially change the industry in a positive way. Definitely was a breath of fresh air during a time of nothing but brown and gray, ugly-ass AAA shootbangs that ran at sub-30 fps.

Still despise that Fickle Companion level.

Days Gone isn't a particularly good game; however, I had no illusions of that going in. It's perhaps the ultimate culmination of the incestuous nature of Sony's first-party development - a game full of systems and storytelling that have been aped from other places internally and executed better elsewhere (seriously, this game even steals the "talk to the gravestone of your loved one and update them on the story's events" gimmick of Horizon Zero Dawn). It's a title that desperately wants to punctuate itself with moments of quiet poignancy but instead hits you over the head with what feels like the unhinged ramblings of a madman. It's a game I would describe as unflinchingly competent but inherently uninspired.

There were, however, a few things I took away from Days Gone for which I will give it credit, even if by accident:

1. Despite this being one of the most unpolished AAA games I've ever played, it did result in at least one amazing glitch. After catching a stray Molotov, my character became engulfed in flames and remained in that state even after technically putting it out. I spent the next several hours with this visual glitch ostensibly cosplaying as Ghost Rider, and it carried through several of the game's most important cutscenes until I had to reload my save.

2. Days Gone actually lets you kill children. Zombie children, granted, but most games of this nature kind of pretend kids don't exist or lock you out from hurting them, so I'm glad they had the balls to let you do it.

3. One of the few games brave enough to have part of its core message be "Revenge is based, actually." Kudos.

About once a year I return to Frostpunk to get a handful of playthroughs in, mostly in the main scenario, but this wonderfully weird combination of survival game and city builder always tends to pull me back when I'm lacking in something else to play. It took me a little while to wrap my mind around the intricacies of its systems but it's thankfully a game that's still fun to learn even in failure.

The biggest compliment I can give to Frostpunk is that I originally played this game in the middle of summer, and by the end of my first session, the unyielding oppression of its frozen scenario left me positively freezing in real life. There's a genuine psychological effect to it that makes you absolutely feel like you're cold, even when it's 90 degrees outside. Never experienced anything like that before.

Balatro cracks the code of what a good, simple, and addictive video game should be. I've already lost more hours to this in the span of a few days than I care to admit, and I'm sure to spend many more collecting all 150 Jokers to complete my Jokerdex. That isn't even a joke.

If I could file one minor complaint, it's that Balatro isn't the greatest at explaining the finer nuances of its design; you're bound to lose a few runs in frustrating fashion while learning the ropes. One particular confusing element is that there are three separate facets of the game that all use the term "hand" - the number of hands you can play per round, your current hand of cards, and the hands of poker you score with. So when I came across a blind that said "You can only play one hand" I mistakenly assumed it meant "one type of hand" (ie full house, two pairs, etc.) and not "You get one hand to play, beat the score or lose the whole run." It's a minor frustration to be sure but one that could be mitigated with a little more clarity.

Now someone please make this game but with mahjong instead of poker and I can die a happy man.

The original Dragon’s Dogma is such an endearing yet strange and kind of clumsy open world game. The story is a bit messy, rushed, and has clearly cut content with somewhat unresolved storylines. Balance is out of whack with vocations. The whole romance system is incredibly silly and comes off as shoehorned in. The start of the game until you get to Gran Soren can be a massive filter, especially that ox cart escort mission. The world is small compared to a lot of other open world games, and yet traveling can be a bit of a slog sometimes.

Despite all that, despite all these glaring flaws, it’s still an incredibly fun and awesome game. Its combat may be the best and most satisfying in any open world game. There’s nothing more exhilarating than climbing up a cyclops and downing it by slashing at its eye. There’s nothing more cool than summoning a tornado and wreaking havoc on a group of bandits. It really is excellent, and you can tell Capcom worked hard on making combat rewarding.

There’s a bunch of other little things too that make it unique. How many games have incorporated the concept of a New Game Plus into their actual story? How many games have a fast travel system where you can physically pick up the actual fast travel points and move them to pretty much wherever you want them to be? How many games are brave enough to have important NPCs that can actually permanently die, or quests that fail if you’ve progressed the story too far before completing them? Sure, you can always beat them in NG+, but still, it’s an RPG with genuine consequences for your actions. Dragon’s Dogma, even ignoring the Dark Arisen stuff, is a one-of-a-kind game that truly feels special, warts and all.

Naturally, I was pretty excited for Dragon’s Dogma 2. Itsuno announced it with passionate glee, seeming to imply that this was going to be the game he really wanted to make. Surely, he won’t disappoint. I mean, DMC5 was a massive comeback after the DmC fiasco. Dude is on the top of his game! What could go wrong?

Well, apparently everything.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 doesn’t feel like a sequel to Dragon’s Dogma. It doesn’t seem to improve on anything. Sure it looks prettier, and I guess the character creator is great, but everything else is either on par or worse than the original.

The combat is no longer snappy and satisfying like the first game. Slicing through an enemy with a sword no longer feels like you’re cutting through flesh and bone. It feels much more weightless with much less feedback. Enemies almost never seem to react to most of your attacks, however even the lowliest goblin can stunlock you for days. You really need to rely on your pawns to an annoying degree when there’s big groups of enemies because of how easily they can wombo combo you. Why is it that I can solo a cyclops or an ogre no problem, but a group of saurians with good timing can take turns slapping me around, getting me stuck in endless stun animations I can’t cancel out of?

I’m not a fan of the changes to movement. This is probably due to the switch to RE Engine, but everything you do feels more sluggish and floaty. I can’t say I’m a particularly big fan of the auto-climbing stuff too, because it often led to my character doing things on their own I didn’t intend to do. I’d rather have 100% complete control over my character than have the “convenience” of the character doing unintended actions for me. Other than the Mage/Sorcerer hover ability, there are no new movement abilities either. In fact, they took out a movement ability by getting rid of the double jump. The overall feel I get is that they went for a more realistic focus for movement, which is pretty lame.

For an open world game, Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels strangely constricted. There’s barely anywhere to truly explore other than caves, which aren’t worth the effort of going through due to the lack of any interesting loot. Very rarely did I ever find anything of note. Even if I did find a decent weapon or armor, it got outclassed by something I could just buy off a merchant soon after.

You can’t really go off the beaten path either because so much of the game has either massive cliffs or large bodies of water preventing you from going anywhere else. A lot of the game feels like going down glorified hallways. It didn’t take long for me to realize how little of the world was actually explorable. With that being said, I guess this was a blessing in disguise because of how much of a chore exploration turned out to be. Until you’re able to access more portcrystals and ferrystones, you’re going to be going down the same paths over and over again with no shortcuts, fighting the same enemies over and over again. It gets immensely tedious and boring pretty quickly. DD1 could sometimes feel like this too, but the much smaller world along with your much faster movement and less frequent enemy encounters made it less of a hassle.

Oxcarts are an option to quickly get places too, but they’re limited to only a few locations and can get destroyed by enemy ambushes, leaving you stranded to walk the rest of the way. You already have to pay to use the oxcarts, so why they needed to have some weird risk attached to it is beyond me. There’s a point where immersion goes too far, and you really need to just allow for there to be some convenience for the player so that the experience isn’t completely miserable.

Vocations are a mixed bag, but ultimately are significantly less interesting than they were in the original. All of them are limited to one weapon. Primary and secondary weapons are no longer a thing, and experimenting with different builds with classes like the Assassin are gone. I’m assuming this was one way to counter balancing issues, yet the balance might be worse than the first game. Thief destroys everything with its Skull Splitter move, which might be the highest damaging attack in the game. As a Thief, you can also steal extremely useful items like wakestone shards and ferrystones from enemies. It’s also the only vocation in the game with an actual dodge move.

The other two classes that seem insanely powerful compared to the rest are Mystic Spearhand and Magic Archer. The former has a skill that straight up makes you temporarily invincible, has a fast cast rate, and costs barely any stamina to use. Magic Archer generally has pretty damn good DPS, but on top of that has a skill that can kill the final boss in one hit. Meanwhile, the normal Archer has to rely on consumables for damage even slightly comparable. Warrior is somewhat of an improvement over the first game due to having 4 instead of 3 active skills and being borderline impossible to knock down, but you’re so damn slow that it doesn’t really matter. Fighter is okay I guess, even if you no longer have 3 skills on both your sword and shield. Mage and Sorcerer feel like they got nerfed to oblivion. Mage was never necessarily great in the first game, but it still felt more powerful than it does here. Cast times for both classes feel insanely long for the relatively pitiful damage they often produce. Not to mention the fact that having only 4 skills instead of 6 really limits their potential.

Then there's Wayfarer and Trickster which don’t feel worth playing at all. Wayfarer only has 3 skills to choose from, since you’re always going to want to have Rearmament selected. The only real benefit you get with Wayfarer is that you can use any armor you want. I have no idea what the fuck you’re supposed to do with Trickster. Apparently, you can do some silly and fun stuff with it, but ultimately why bother with a class that can’t directly damage enemies when you could just go Thief and kill everything in seconds?

The game's story is strange. The first Dragon's Dogma isn't exactly a narrative masterpiece or anything, but it at least put enough effort into its cinematics and presentation to keep you invested. There are memorable moments like the opening where your fishing village gets attacked by the dragon, fending off the hydra at the encampment, first meeting the Dragonforged, sneaking into the castle and seeing the king go schizo and trying to kill the princess, and more. NPCs were a lot more memorable and unique, and despite not always being super fleshed out I still cared about what happened to them to a certain extent.

2 on the other hand is a whole lot of nothing. It starts off okay, but there’s a notable lack of presentation or even comprehensible plot throughout. Important details like the fact that you’re the true heir to the throne are just nonchalantly told to you in the generic NPC conversation. You’d think they’d try to make something like that a bit more of a big deal by dedicating a cutscene to it. I don’t even remember what really happens in the story. It feels like you sneak into the castle a few times for some reason, go to desert land for some reason, rebuild the Godsbane for some reason, fight a giant rock golem thing that you apparently don’t even need to fight because the NPCs kill it for you, then suddenly it’s time for the final boss. It’s like stuff is happening around you, but the game never really bothers to elaborate on what’s going on or why you should care. It’s just things happening.

Characters are basically nonexistent, lacking any and all personality. There were several characters in DD1 with their own quest lines that at least tried to develop them a little bit. I can’t recall a single notable thing about the DD2 characters, other than the fact that once I maxed out their affinity they kept asking me to escort them 2000 miles away to Bumfuck, New Mexico on foot.

Then there’s the post-game, where you’re timed and are supposed to evacuate a bunch of towns. Problem is that I couldn’t give a fuck. The NPCs themselves didn’t seem to care either because all of their dialog was no different than usual, other than the handful of quest giving NPCs. Oh yeah, the game just ends with an interactive cutscene as well. Sure I supposed the real final boss is the Dragon in the normal ending, but it’s pretty lame compared to the much more bombastic and cinematic finale of DD1.

The funny thing is, as negative as I sound, much of my disappointment comes less from me thinking the game is bad, and simply thinking it’s less good. There’s genuinely a lot of potential in this. You have the foundation for really interesting storylines and quests with there being prejudice about different races now that we have elves, dwarves, and the weird cat people that still have human ears for some reason. Yet they did nothing with it. Combat does have some interesting changes and could have been better if they didn’t change the feel of it. Could have helped having better enemy variety as well. Exploration could have been made better if the world design was more interesting and you had more maneuverability, but it just became more tedious. Ultimately, the game feels like a half-assed clone of the original that misunderstands what worked and what didn’t.

People were joking about Dragon’s Dogma 2 just being Dragon’s Dogma 1.5, but really it feels even less than that to me. I tried to enjoy it, I really did, but it left me feeling hollow. This was allegedly Itsuno’s vision, what Dragon’s Dogma was supposed to be. I come away from it feeling lied to, swindled even, especially considering the $70 price tag. What’s more frustrating is that I keep seeing people talk about, “oh don’t worry, Capcom will release a Dark Arisen-esque expansion that’ll really give us what we want!” Sorry, but I’m not shelling out another $20-$40 on an expansion to a $70 game for the unfounded belief that they’ll actually finish the game this time.

Well damn, didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did, but for once Game Freak did something right.

I think what made this game work so well for me and made it so addicting is just the fact that the actual act of catching Pokemon is way more fun. Something that I never went out of my way to do in any past Pokemon game is, oddly enough, catching them all. It generally feels like a chore, and the RNG aspect of it can be frustrating. Having more direct control over the process of catching Pokemon makes it a lot more fun and interesting. I also enjoyed the different objectives to fill out the Pokedex entries too. Made you feel much more like an actual researcher.

I'm normally not into survival crafting games, but they make it work here. All the crafting is pretty much focused on creating items that make the Pokemon catching process easier and more efficient (especially for Alpha Pokemon). It's simple enough to never get annoying, and it constantly incentivizes you to keep exploring for materials.

The battles are a little weird with the Agile/Strong mechanics, and I spent most of the game barely utilizing it. I mainly used Agile moves so that my moves would be weak enough to not defeat wild Pokemon so I could catch them. Turn priority is also strange and I felt like I never completely understood it. They're definitely on to something with these new mechanics, but they come off as a bit undercooked.

I'm mixed on the trainer battles because while I appreciate that this game isn't afraid to kick your ass a bit, some of them just turn into trading one-hit KOs with each other. It often felt like wild and trainer Pokemon were significantly stronger than yours, regardless of level. Thankfully, this is far from the focus of the game, and trainer battles barely happen. Pokemon's general battle mechanics are so strong, that it's difficult to make it not work.

I really enjoyed exploring the world and completing side quests. The side quests are simple, but add a lot of flavor to the game, really making you feel like you're helping a community understand these strange creatures more. Ride Pokemon are also awesome in this, especially with how seamlessly you can switch between them. If there's anything that modern Game Freak should be applauded for, it's getting rid of HMs and replacing them with something much more interesting.

If there's anything I'm not so keen on, it's the boss battles. I appreciate the attempt at making Pokemon more action oriented, but this clunky dodge-roll-to-win shit is not what I want from a Pokemon game. Most of the battles really aren't that bad, but the Arcanine and Avalugg ones felt like you could get easily screwed over by RNG due to the small and awkwardly shaped arenas. At least you can basically brute force your way through these eventually with the continue option if you really suck at them.

What can I say, Game Freak did good here. I'm pleasantly surprised. Maybe this is a sign that there still is some talent left at Game Freak. Maybe they'll listen to the criticisms of Violet/Scarlet and improve on the next iteration. I'm not completely convinced, but at least there's still a small smidgen of hope.