contrary to popular belief, the wiimote does not have a gyroscope in it. gyroscopes are devices commonly used to measure rotation, so this may come as a bit of a shock to you if you've played kororinpa or its sequel, which are entirely based around rotating the wiimote to tilt obstacle courses for a rolling marble. instead, the wiimote features a three-axis accelerometer, which tracks linear movement. imagine that these devices feature a small weight suspended by springs. when the device is moved in a direction, the acceleration will cause the weight to squash a spring in the direction it moves in while stretching a spring in the opposite direction. thus, by measuring the squash and stretch of these springs (or whatever equivalent is actually in the accelerometer you're using), you can detect linear movement in any given direction. if you want to prove to yourself that this technology drives the motion sensing in kororinpa, simply turn the tilt visualization on during a stage, place the wiimote on a flat surface, and push it from side to side. even though the wiimote isn't tilting at all, the tilt visualization will rock back and forth as if it were.

knowing this, the precision of the tilt sensing in kororinpa stumped me for quite a while until I stumbled upon this tidbit of information. the accelerometer in the wiimote measures acceleration in its rest frame, which is on Earth, where we are constantly experiencing a gravity force downwards into the planet's core. because everything we are surrounded by experiences this, the accelerometer, if it were in free fall and only affected by the Earth's gravity, would not register any movement at all. likewise, when the wiimote is sitting flat in your hand or resting on a table, it is being pushed up against gravity, and so it registers a constant acceleration upwards. kororinpa exploits this by constantly tracking which axes the upwards acceleration affects at any given time. for example, if the wiimote is at rest and there's still a constant acceleration in the positive X direction (that is, jutting out from the left side of the controller), then the player must have rolled the wiimote clockwise, and the game will tilt the current level clockwise as well. extremely clever and well-implemented for a japanese launch title!

the gameplay brilliance of this control scheme comes from the ability to freely tilt each level in any direction and thus alter its relative position to the marble, changing walls to floors and vice versa. in each level, the game requires the player to search out some number of orange diamonds before reaching an end goal. combined with the ability to freely tilt, each level places its collectable diamonds in spots that must be approached by transitioning the marble up walls and back onto floors without accidentally letting it fly into the void. the best applications of these let the player skip wide gaps and navigate complex 3D mazes by "altering gravity" as well as letting the ball purposefully free-fall before catching it onto a surface with a careful tilt.

of course, the resourcefulness of this control scheme naturally forces restrictions on what kinds of levels are feasible without causing the controller to go haywire. firstly, because the reference values for movement are calculated when the wiimote is right-side up, it is much less precise when completely upside-down, and thus no stages ever force you to completely turn the wiimote over. secondly, because the reference view for the player must be consistent, the game always displays in a fixed perspective slanted down at the marble. any section that requires the player to roll the ball towards themselves cannot actually show upcoming obstacles to the player, which necessitates frustrating trial-and-error in these sections thanks to the lack of line of sight. the map, which does not allow free-roam and is uncomfortable fixed to the marble as a center point, is not a great help either. the most disappointing expression of both of these restrictions is the final unlockable level, which seems like the ideal complex 3D maze mentioned in the previous paragraph at first glance yet shies from truly maximizing the mechanical potential because every single section can be tackled without fully flipping the orientation of the level.

fortunately basic execution tests on your fine motor skills and ability to control your tilting through tight corridors and wall-less ledges serves as a solid foundation for the majority of the levels. most levels in the main campaign are less exploratory and more akin to linear gauntlets, which helps alleviate frustration with the camera. while the designers have a decent grasp on how to design appropriate challenges around the limited controls and unique free-tilt mechanics, the later stages begin exhibiting an uncomfortable tendency to escalate difficulty by simply drawing out the length of the stages. often times the most difficult stages feel more like disjoint challenges glued together with no connecting throughline, or worse, copy-pasted segments obsessed with testing consistency. fun enough for one straight playthrough, but rather tedious when going for faster times. perhaps they should've chopped many of these stages into multiple smaller stages and driven up overall stage count.

kororinpa is a budget title that can be bested within a couple of hours, but to the developers' credit they padded out the experience in meaningful ways for those looking to invest more brainpower. for starters, new marbles with different handling characteristics and shapes are unlocked during the campaign, and experimenting with which marbles work best with which layouts and hazards helps diversify approaches when optimizing each level. to encourage this, the game offers a rank system, with extra-difficult bonus levels appearing as the player achieves more and more "gold trophy" times in levels. there are also emeralds tucked away in each level as collectables; the best of these illustrate routes for interesting skips or narrow alternate routes, while the worst merely require tossing one's self off an edge repeatedly until hitting the emerald off-screen. each set of collected emeralds unlocks another set of bonus levels, which veer more towards "shitpost-y" themes like castle exploration and slalom skiing. it's unfortunate that these two separate extrinsic motivation methods feel antithetical to each other, as going for the emeralds often jeopardizes a gold trophy time, and you're unable to recollect emeralds after collecting them the first time in case you wanted to try a route that both sets a record time and collects the emerald.

overall this game shines best when it leans into the strengths of its control scheme and lets you devise nasty flips and skips, gently tossing the marble around between different surfaces. I would have liked to have seen more variety in these surfaces, as many of the levels descend to mediocrity by keeping all of their surfaces flat with guard rails and each of the joints between walls and floors completely 90 degrees. the most interesting levels are those that play with sloping surfaces, especially when switching between different slopes very quickly. another good variation on this are levels that feature heavy curved edges where one can build up speed yet must avoid careening off from the downward force, such as the ufo bonus level or the downward jam in the dessert world. more levels that utilized these concepts would have kept me from viewing a decent chunk of the levels as nondescript; a major dampener in any puzzle action game. still impressed by it nonetheless.

They definitely cranked things up a notch from Virtua Cop 1 as levels are way more dynamic both in terms of actual character movement setpieces and interactibility with a lot of items in the backgrounds reacting to being shot. The enemy count and overall tempo of the game has been increased a fair bit as well. Every level has two paths in it, so that also encourages at least one replay. It's absolutely a marked improvement over the first. That being said, I still kinda found it a bit meh. Maybe it's the lack of real distinct enemy types, maybe it's the kinda generic urban environment and okay soundtrack not really doing it for me, maybe it's me playing this after coming right off of the house of the dead high, idk. I do think it's funny that the enemy gang just has multiple large squads of dudes just hiding in a single file line behind various desks just to pop out one at a time. It's not an entirely brainless light gun game, as enemies do react quickly and this game definitely encourages taking out enemies that aren't marked yet by the sight just to get them out of the way so they don't get the upper hand later. It's just kinda bland I guess. Inoffensive-core. Though if I ever see an arcade cab of this out in the wild there's no reason NOT for me to give this a go. I'd just rather be playing HotD.

Came into this expecting a mid game with immaculate vibes and that's exactly what I got.

The visuals here are peak PS3 in both an artistic and technical sense. The environmental design is on point with each area in both the real and faery world being an absolute treat to look at. The whole folktale aesthetic they have going is super interesting and they do it great justice. It's one of those games that makes me say "man, PS3 graphics really are all that we need". The game is certainly a feast for the eyes and really hard carry the game.

Unfortunately those vibes are coupled with some real snoozepilled game design choices. Firstly, the game has the DMC4 problem where you gotta go through pretty much all the areas and fight all the bosses twice to kind of pad the game out, and unlike DMC where the stylish combat can kinda mitigate that blatant padding, this games combat isn't nearly as interesting. The combat boils down to essentially collecting the various enemies in the game to use as different attacks for each face button. Each attack has its own elemental attribute and effectiveness so it's all about making a good loadout to suit your playstyle. It's a neat concept that could give a lot of customization and user flexibility with the combat, but I found in my playthrough that it's extremely hard to chain together different attacks on different buttons in a satisfying manner. I played basically as if each button was its own distinct attack for its own distinct scenario rather than having them all be tools for one big combo playstyle. Each attack can also be levelled up by grinding, but like man this game is already padded out as is I wasn't in any mood to do that kind of thing. Lastly, absorbing characters is done by doing goofy sixaxis gyro nonsense, and while I am a huge advocate for that kinda nonsense, it does make encounters with multiple enemies a disaster because you are almost guaranteed to get hit by another enemy while you are shaking the controller like a mfer trying to fill a gauge as fast as you can. The combat just wasn't doin it for me, which combined with the whole two playthrough shenanigans meant the game felt like a drag to play. Maybe there are cool combos you can do with chaining guys effectively though and its just a skill/knowledge issue on my part though.

The plot is interesting though, it's a pretty simple and kinda predictable lil mystery case, though the last 2 chapters definitely lost me a little bit in terms of what was going on and what actually meant what. The characters were certainly fun to see interact with one another, shoutouts to the absolute chad legend that is Keats. Every cutscene that mfer is doing some kinda jojo pose, he has all the charisma in the world inside of him.

overall, yeah. I'm glad that I finally got around to playing this after seeing it pop up on my radar a few years back. If you are like me and enjoy vibes in games this is absolutely worth taking a look at, but the gameplay and length doesn't really do this much favors in my book. Even though it wasn't the most mindblowing I do wish sony would give this a bit more love. I don't even think this game was referenced in playstation all stars battle royale and that game was in the same generation as this. It also seems like a hefty amount of passion and budget went into this as well so it's a waste for sony to drop it like a rock so quickly. The game's not even available on the hellspace that is the PS3 PSN store and it's also not on the PS now streaming platform, and this game definitely deserves better than that. It may be mid, but it's charmingly mid, and that is absolutely my kind of video game.

more PGR baybeeee

I'd honestly put it on-par with the first game as both this and 1 kinda have their own ups and downs. This game does run at 30 FPS rather than 1s 60 and it is a bit apparent for a racing game like this, unfortunately. The overall progression is better paced than the first games mid-game wall, but also can kinda feel a bit boring as you really have to challenge yourself by picking higher difficulties, and kudos don't really matter AS much here than in the first. PGR but more streamlined. The OST is also a lot larger here than in PGR1 but also because of that I felt like the songs didn't stick with me as much as game 1s songs, for better or for worse. Again nothing really significantly better or significantly worse between the two games, just different.

The gameplay is the same extremely solid and fun racing that I expect from this series, everything has just the right amount of weight, and going fast feels really good. The lack of emphasis on kudos earning to complete missions makes this much more of a pure racing game. They bumped the city count from the four games in the first to a staggering eleven this time around, with two bonus cities as DLC. There are also a significantly larger amount of events to go through here, so they really turbo-charged the content here.

The real star of the show here is the online support. Shoutouts to insignia for bringing the online functions of this game back up, because I genuinely can't imagine playing this without them. Everything is tracked in their own individual leaderboards, and the kudos system quantifying your driving skill means that throughout the entire game you are constantly being shown your skill relative to the rest of the world, and that plus the general small size of the insignia community means that it's extremely motivating to try things again to get better scores and rise up on the leaderboards. Whereas the kudos are a bit downplayed in the singleplayer progression, they are the crux of the multiplayer, which is awesome. The online racing itself is incredibly full-featured as well, as you can drive any track using any class of car with your friends, and it's fun as all hell. The netcode is honestly really great, as I have mostly played with people from Europe whereas I am in California with little to no issues at all, and the lobby system has tons of QOL to it that a lot of other racing games even today don't even have.

Overall it's the same great gameplay of PGR but with a crapton of content presented in a different, fresh way. Probably one of the best racing games on the system (i still haven't played forza 1), and an ABSOLUTE must-own if you are an insignia user or plan to be one.

(oh yeah geometry wars is such a sick bonus minigame to hide in here too, can't forget about that either)

def a downgrade from 1 and 2 in most ways, but I still had a solid amount of fun with it. Whereas the first two games have lots of encounters with 1-4 zombies of various different types in various different scenerios, this game likes to just throw zombies all over you in huge waves. The auto-reloading and large shotgun shot radius means that it doesn't get overwhelming to blast through the increased enemy count, but it does make the game feel less carefully balanced. The biggest core gameplay change is how the levels aren't dynamic anymore, where now you just get to choose which order you play the middle 3 levels in. The visuals are a bit grittier, the soundtrack is much more dramatic, and the plot takes itself a bit more seriously. Definitely a bit of a departure from the more goofy shenanigans of the first two games. It's definitely still a house of the dead game, I just found it rather bland compared to its predecessors.

shoutouts to the PS move controller for working surprisingly well here though, it was easier to calibrate accurately than even the wii zapper.

animal crossing finally concludes its slow and steady descent into a list of chores served alongside a heaping helping of bread and circuses. the experience of playing new horizons is closer to playing a dead mmo than it is to any sort of zen-like getaway game.

animal crossing has always had a nasty hook monster but it is no longer lurking around the small town, showing its face to you rarely and at a distance. now, it has picked up a beach-front property and firmly moved in. it is now the most important resident, and by god, if you do not play by its rules, you are not going to have a good time.

i think i can finally accept this as the definitive version of dark souls, particularly when fixed up with the original armor textures (which were horribly flattened in this one, for reasons i cannot fathom), a reshade profile which adjusts the lighting and contrast to be a bit closer to that of the original game (gotta have that heavy chiaroscuro and golden glow), and a mod which augments and meshes with the game's own online functionality to cycle through each location for possible invasions whether within the limitations of your own soul and weapon levels or infinitely upward. i haven't waited more than a minute or two to invade with this mod, and for me this is an absolute godsend since i am far more interested in 'organic' invasions, world pvp style, than i am in sweaty arena duels at the oolacile township bonfire.

i hadn't actually played this game at all since moving back home to michigan (from portland, oregon) at the end of 2019, and... well, "it feels like going home again" isn't what i want to say: it's more like a refreshing reminder that i haven't lost everything, though sometimes it feels that way. i don't think of too many video games as being mine, made for me, but this is one of them.