I'm so glad I decided to give this another try. Hollow Knight is genuinely one of the most beautiful games ever made, elegant in both presentation and gameplay. The world is so rich with lore and so fun (and sometimes scary) to just exist in that I never minded the long walks back and forth to places to get to where the next adventure might be. I'm normally not a huge fan of Metroidvanias (I'm horrible with directions so I usually get lost and frustrated if I'm not using a guide) but beating this game has made me interested in exploring the genre further and getting better at them.

So uh when's Silksong

To call God of War Ragnarok a flawless masterpiece is overselling things a touch. Hell, I'd even say it falls short of it's predecessor. It does little to shake up the formula established by God of War 2018, at times feeling like Santa Monica is too afraid of failure to mess with their award-winning success. The story is also far more grand and expansive than the previous game's, but at the same time loses that simple character-driven excellence and perfectly paced storyline that made 2018's the best in gaming.

However, if you can look past these flaws (and make it through a horrifically slow first third), you'll find that Ragnarok is a truly excellent game, one well worth your time. The excellent combat from the first game returns, this time with a much richer enemy variety for you to sink your blades into. Plus, although there are plenty of issues with the story, the epic finale to the Norse tale that began four years ago is ultimately very satisfying, bolstered by an incredibly stellar voice cast and giving many moments that will give fans plenty to laugh and cry over. In the end, I think this is a game that will only improve when revisited, as the things that shine brightest will continue to be loved, while the game's problems may fade into the background.

I love this game. I love this game so freakin’ much. Where to even start with it?

For better or for worse, Horizon Zero Dawn’s legacy is going to be tied to Zelda: Breath of the Wild for a long time. They were released in the same week, are both open-world adventure games, and (in my humble opinion) represent their respective publishers at their absolute best. But where Breath of the Wild embraced an exciting new vision for the open-world format, focusing on exploration and player discovery, Horizon embraces classic traditions pioneered by games like Assassin’s Creed and polished them until they shined like the sun.

Which is better? I dunno. Honestly, I have them side-by-side on my Top 50 games list because it’s hard for me to pick one over the other. They both do things right, they both have flaws, and if all goes according to plan their sequels will surpass both of them (though not in the same week again please).

But enough about all that stuff nobody cares about, why do I love Horizon Zero Dawn? Well, simply put, it’s just an amazing adventure game. Sure, it’s not that influential or experimental, but it’s a damn good time. I feel like the devs accomplished everything they set out to do with this game, and that's pretty darn rare in an industry run by pencil pushers constantly cutting stuff and challenging creative visions.

The world is one of the most richly designed and realized worlds I’ve ever seen in a game. It feels like more than just a mishmash of polygons with some fake trees attached, it’s like a real world existing just inside of the screen. I love that as you travel through the world you pass through the lands of several different tribes, and as you do so you can see the culture and architecture change to match their designs. I love the mix of the primeval world and the futuristic robotic designs, in any other game it would be incredibly easy to make them feel like two different worlds awkwardly mashed together, but the more subtle aspects of Horizon’s art design makes it feel like one could not exist without the other. The clothing design is the true star of the show here, if you look closely you can see all of it is tied together with wires and machine parts.

And that’s not even getting started on the machine design. The best part of the game is the combat against the robot monsters, hands down. There are dozens if not hundreds of ways to go about fighting them, and as you start fighting the more advanced creatures you’re forced to think of more creative solutions to your problems. Each weapon is easy to pick up but difficult to master, and they’re all a complete blast to use. I especially enjoyed the Ice and Lightning guns available in the Frozen Wilds expansion.

As for the story, I will say it’s got some problems (it sort of loses focus on the emotional core towards the end and becomes about fighting angry AIs), but overall it’s a ton of fun. In an age when we’re drowning in JRPGs filled with soulless characters making anime grunting noises and dropping dump truck loads of exposition in your lap every 5 minutes, it’s incredibly refreshing to have an protagonist who actually feels like a real person and not an overly serious conduit for the writer to live out their edgelord fantasy. Aloy is one of my favourite protagonists in video games without a doubt. I love that she represents a beacon of hope for the world but feels conflicted about her place in it due to her being rejected as a child. I love that she’s not completely serious all the time, often joking to herself as she’s travelling the world. She’s a fully realized three-dimensional character, and one that I completely enjoyed spending hundreds of hours with.

There are a few weaker elements to the game, like the climbing mechanics (the constant yellow ropes that dictate where you can climb are the one fault in the otherwise flawless art design) and the human combat is pretty shallow when compared to the excellent Monster Hunter-like machine battles, but these are minor inconveniences when looking at the big picture. Horizon is likely to go down in history as one of Sony’s all time great franchises thanks to this game’s success, and the sequel can’t come soon enough.

TL;DR: robot t-rex game good

Seriously just perfect in every way. I've beaten this game like four or five times now and the art direction, music, level design and pitch perfect platforming blows me away every single playthrough.

Unlike other platformers where the levels you explore rarely feel organic outside of the realm of game design, the levels and worlds of Tropical Freeze are built to feel like real, living parts of the world the DK crew lives in, and sometimes there's even a cool little narrative that progresses as you travel through the worlds. No two levels are alike and it makes every single moment of the experience a joy. My favourite level, Cliffslide Slide, comes towards the end of the game, and features silhouetted versions of the playable characters against an avalanche, and it's just a sight to behold.

The music by DKC vet David Wise is also one of the best in the entire industry. Songs like Mangrove Cove, Grassland Groove and Punch Bowl are instant earworms, and it's a shame that more of these tracks weren't included in Smash Ultimate.

This one is definitely up there with Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey as one of Nintendo's modern masterpieces. Play it now if you haven't.

This was just delightful, an adorable and super addicting farming sim starring a wide variety of slimes. This is the kind of game that you sit down to play for an hour and then you look up and your entire day is gone.

I loved discovering and taking care of all of the different slimes and plants, growing my farm, earning money, the quicksilver slime race minigame, experimenting with slime science, exploring the world and finding keys to open up new areas, it's all done so unbelievably well. The highest praise I can give this game is that it feels like something Nintendo would make.

It's not all perfect though, unfortunately. Fast travel is annoyingly limited, resulting in long walks back and forth from places. The final area you unlock is pretty barren and disappointing. And this might be personal opinion but the story did nothing for me, I think this is a situation where voice acting could've made it a bit more interesting. These are all minor gripes though.

If you're a fan of games like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley or Viva Pinata, you owe it to yourself to play this game. Don't miss it.

It's really funny that Rare got the whole 3D platformer collectathon thing so perfect here on their first try that every time they went back to the genre for another attempt they could never get it quite as good again.

This is one of those games where you can tell the entire dev team was passionate about having their product be the best one on the shelf. They stuffed everything they possibly could into this game, and yet you never feel lost or overwhelmed. Sure some of it hasn't aged great (the camera, Rusty Bucket Bay, and pretty much everything about the ending to name a few things) but in the face of everything Banjo-Kazooie gets right these are relatively small annoyances.

Oh brother you'd better have some friends around to play with for this one because otherwise you just bought yourself a $60 coaster.

It sucks because there's a great game buried in here! The classic death metal grungy Strikers aesthetic has been toned down a bit to match Nintendo's modern, more generalized approach to the Mario series but it's still there in spades, plus Next Level Games has brought their amazing and personality-filled animation style from Luigi's Mansion 3 over here too. The chaotic anything goes approach to soccer still works so well, and I thought switching from 1 captain character and 3 teammate characters to just 4 captain characters was a great idea that makes it feel less like you need to get the ball to one specific character and more like you can change things up on the fly. The mashup courts are a fun idea, although they all feel kind of samey and I do miss more unique courses like the mud pit and windy island from Charged.

But of course, it doesn't take long before Battle League's problems rear their ugly head. Only 10 characters at launch for a game like this is just pathetic and reeks of this game getting forced out the door so Nintendo could have a June release. Series favourites like Daisy, Boo, and Diddy Kong are absent right now, and you can feel their absence when you find yourself seeing Luigi on seemingly every team in the tournament mode. Part of the fun of the game is mashing characters together and see how they combo on a team but with such a limited roster you'll find a team that works for you so quickly that there's really no reason to try anyone else. There are also only 5 possible options to choose from for the mashup courts, which is very disappointing considering they're just backgrounds. Tournament mode is fun if only because it lets you play the game but the AI is laughably easy to beat and it really amounts to nothing, aside from giving you coins that allow you to buy minor upgrades for the characters.

Most disappointing of all is the online mode, which forces you to join an online team to even play it. Most I could see were invite only so that was a wash.

Maybe I'll come back in a year and find Battle League is the best Strikers game ever, but right now outside of local multiplayer there really isn't any reason to check this out, and that's very unfortunate.

Revisited this mostly as a way to check out how well Xbox's Cloud Gaming service works (the answer? better than you'd expect but I'd imagine the lag would be complete misery in a game that isn't mostly slow paced like this is) but also because sometimes you just gotta replay a childhood classic to remind yourself that this world isn't completely terrible, y'know? Going in I figured I'd put together a garden, maybe run through all the sours and then call it a day, I've put so many hours into this game over the years that not every playthrough needs to go for 100%. What I didn't expect was that this game would hook me in yet again just like it did all those years ago and I'd wind up playing and playing until I couldn't pinata anymore.

Personally I've always considered the Viva Pinata series to be Rare's last hurrah before their quiet and peaceful death (and indeed before their unceremonious revival as an unholy shambling corpse at the hands of Microsoft's necromancers). It kinda feels like a fitting end for the company that was indisputably the king of gaming in the 90s, it's very much ahead of its time like so many Rare classics are, it's among the best-looking of its era and features so much of that classic wry British charm that Rare's always had in spades, while at the same time feeling like a far cry for the company that infamously (and at the time recently) broke off the legendary partnership with Nintendo that made them a household name because they really wanted to chase the M-Rated high Goldeneye gave them. This was also the last game composer Grant Kirkhope worked on for the company that made him famous, and you can tell in some of the music tracks that he too recognizes this as an end of an era.

But really, if this was Rare's informal goodbye to the game industry, then it's a hell of a way to go. Maybe it's nostalgia talking because I played this game so much when I was around 10 that the strategy guide I had literally disintegrated, but I think that Viva Pinata is the single best life simulation game ever made with the exception of Animal Crossing. As with all of Rare's best games, Trouble in Paradise is packed to the gills with stuff to do and things to collect so you never get bored and everytime you feel ready to take a break you're always struck with that feeling of "Welllll...lemme just do this first." All of the many collectible papery critters are delightfully colourful, wonderfully designed and just so damn expressive that you leave the game feeling nothing but love for each and every one of them. They're all just so full of life and personality that you can't help but say "aww" as a wild owl ravages its way through the mouse population you've spent hours building up. You feel genuine excitement every time you trigger something new to appear or visit or best of all decide to stay in your garden, and there's no greater feeling than when you come up with a massive plan involving redesigning your garden to bring in something new and everything goes perfectly.

The one thing I'll knock Trouble in Paradise for is that sometimes it can be a little frustrating. For one, you're kind of at the mercy of what wild pinatas the game spawns outside your garden barriers. You could have everything ready for one specific critter only for it to just not show up for days on end for seemingly no reason, and that gets very annoying, especially if you're waiting on something specific to show up before you can move on to the next thing you have planned. Usually my playthroughs of this game end when I just don't feel like waiting around for stuff to show up anymore, and that's more or less what happened this time as well. I also think that the antagonists who want nothing more than to ruin your day are way too OP here, particularly main baddie Professor Pester. This red-faced jackass comes into your garden on a daily basis with the goal of smashing your most valuable critter, and dealing with him is a colossal headache. There are ways to manage his visits but they range from expensive to unreliable, so in the end the only real way to stop him is by exploiting a fence glitch that leaves him completely befuddled for a few minutes outside your barriers before heading home. In all my years of playing of this game I've yet to meet another fan that doesn't utilize this glitch in every playthrough, and that's because completely removing the Professor from the equation does nothing but improve Trouble in Paradise. There are also a few requirements that border on complete insanity, like the five elephants needed to free the eagle. I read a comment once that said something along the lines of "90% of this game is super fun and relaxing, but man, that extra 10% is a pain" and I couldn't agree more.

Yes, Trouble in Paradise is far from perfect, and yes, a lot of my love for the game comes from nostalgia, but I still think that this is one of the most underrated games to ever exist. The only thing it really did wrong was release on a console that mostly pandered to the FPS crowd in an era when that genre was the only thing people bought an Xbox for, because I've always thought it deserves more love. The best compliment I have for it was that even with the lag of Cloud Gaming I still had an amazing time revisiting Pinata Island.

Hoo boy, I have a lot to say about this one. If you just want my (admittedly kinda biased because I love this franchise) opinion and don't care to read paragraph after paragrah of a Horizon superfan's rambles about every nook and cranny of the Forbidden West, I'll start off by saying that this is the best game I've played since Smash Bros. Ultimate in 2018, and any PS5 owner would be straight up bonkers to not have it in their collection. Everything you loved about HZD is here in spades, everything that needed a bit of fixing has been thoroughly polished, and there are so many wonderful new places to discover and things to do added by the team at Guerilla that make Horizon Forbidden West an incredibly stellar and fulfilling experience. That said, if you didn't really get into HZD, or you just don't really gel with these open world action-adventure RPG-type games, you might wanna hold off until a sale, as I don't think it's the game to convince you otherwise. That said I'd say it's still absolutely worth a try even if you feel that way, because I think even if you still don't really vibe with it you'll at least appreciate the improvements over the first game.

Okay, got that out of the way, now into the long talk about everything.

(I tried to keep this as spoiler-free as possible but I do talk about some major points of Zero Dawn's ending and talk vaguely about a few things that weren't in the trailers for Forbidden West so if you wanna go completely unspoiled I'd recommend waiting to read this)

First things first, I don't think I can say anything about the visuals that can't be said just by looking at footage of the game. Oh my god, Forbidden West is beautiful. I don't think it's hyperbole to say this is the single prettiest game I've ever seen. Just as with Zero Dawn, every inch of the map in Forbidden West feels meticulous and deliberate, and this new world to explore set west of Zero Dawn's map feels like a natural continuation of that game's visual storytelling. Leaving the lands of the familiar Carja and Oseram tribes into the mysterious unknown home of the new Utaru and Tenakth tribes made me feel truly out of my comfort zone, as I navigated these new tribes with their own rituals, politics, and histories for the first time. As with the first game the art department fired on all cylinders for this one, using the discrepency between the pacifist farmer Utaru and the violent warrior Tenakth to create a very fun balance of calm and wild art styles that transition between each other seamlessly as you travel between each tribe's lands. The Tenakth art deserves special mention, I fell so in love with the sharp blues, reds and yellows used by them on their clothing and tattoos that once I obtained high-level Tenakth armor and facepaint I straight-up refused to ever take it off. Unfortunately a game this beautiful does come with some caveats, including a lot of pop-in. It's nothing game-breaking and I do hope it gets fixed in a later patch, but it can be jarring seeing large buildings in the distance suddenly appear out of thin air or background characters magically materialize in the middle of a cutscene.

Speaking of the art department, the new machines they've created for the Forbidden West are just as amazing and instantly iconic as the ones in the first game were back in 2017. My personal favourites include the raptorlike Clawstrider, the pteradonesque Sunwings, and especially the enormous serpentine Slitherfangs, among many, many others. I won't spoil my #1 favourite as I don't believe it was shown in any of the marketing but one of the final machines you discover genuinely made my jaw drop the first time I saw it. Hint: it lives on a beach right by the ocean. You'll know what I'm talking about when you see it. Pretty much all your favourites from Zero Dawn are here as well, save a few that honestly didn't need to come back. This creates a delightful mix of old and new, and you're always excited to see what robotic monsters are waiting around the next corner.

But of course, the machines would be nothing without fun ways to fight them, and Forbidden West delivers in that department immensely as well. As much as I'm happy to gush on about Zero Dawn's combat (and I will for hours on end if you let me), I will concede that it eventually falls into a loop of tying down a machine with the Ropecaster and then wailing on it until it breaks free, then starting the cycle again. The team at Guerilla cleverly subverted this by not offering the Ropecaster until about halfway through your adventure, and even then nerfing it so it isn't the be-all end-all of your arsenal anymore. Now you're encouraged to experiment with different weapon types to see what each machine will fall to easiest. In addition to returning classics like the bow and sling, several new weapons are welcome additions to the mix that allow you to approach combat in many different ways. I especially loved the gatling gun-like Boltblasters that deal massive amounts of damage, but frequently require reloading that gives enemies openings to attack you. One thing I didn't love is the increased amount of time Aloy needs to get up after taking heavy damage, as at times this led to fights with bigger machines feeling more unfair than they needed to. I had to repeat one story battle a few times just because a particularly large and opportunistic machine just needed to knock me down once before it just started wailing on me, giving me no opportunity to get up or escape. I think there should've been a way to decrease this downtime in the new and improved skill trees to make some of these fights a little less frustrating. Human combat has been expanded upon as well after feeling like something of an afterthought in HZD. Now when clearing a bandit camp you no longer have to go through the whole thing and take out every single goon in there, if you want you can just take out the leader and leave the rest. Bad guys are much more adept at close combat now as well, so it's no longer a game of getting up close and then pressing R2 to win. It still pales in comparison to the machine combat (but really, what wouldn't?), but I'm glad an effort was made to improve over what felt pretty basic in the original game.

Still with me? Cool, because it's time to talk about the story.

I really loved Zero Dawn's story, but as I said when I reviewed the game last summer one issue I still have with it is that as it approaches the ending it feels like it loses focus on the beating heart at the center, that being Aloy and her feeling like an outcast in this big new world, and starts to go a little nuts with the lore and backstory and kinda lets the big reveals and imminent threat of HADES destroying the world carry it through to the credits. It's still a very fun ending and a lot of that lore comes into play here, but it does feel like there's an emotional component missing to end off Aloy's journey there. Here, all that has been solved. Forbidden West is genuinely the Empire Stikes Back to Zero Dawn's A New Hope. While I won't spoil the biggest surprise of the game (it comes fairly early on but I still would absolutely hate to ruin it for any superfan that hasn't gotten there yet since it wasn't in any trailers), it does wonders to give Aloy further drive than just "save the world because that's what Elisabet Sobek would've done". The side characters are much improved too. In the first game the only one that got any real development was Sylens, and everyone else ranged from either cool to just kinda there. Here, everyone has a distinct personality and story arc to follow, from returning faces Erend and Varl to new characters Zo, Kotallo, Alva, and many, many others. Zo the Utaru Gravesinger is the standout for me, easily. Her relationships with Varl and Erend lead to many funny and touching interactions that leave her feeling very memorable, and I loved watching her discover the world of the Old Ones. Guerilla still hasn't quite figured out the secret to naturalistic dialogue the way their Sony cousins at Naughty Dog or Studio Santa Monica have (some lines or delivery still feel overly proper and a little stilted) but it's significantly easier to digest here than it was in Zero Dawn, thanks to the departure of the robotic AI generated animations for conversation cutscenes in favour of fully animated and mocapped characters, making the world and the people that live in it feel all the more real. Special mention goes to Ashly Burch's returning performance as Aloy, she already made for a great lead in Zero Dawn but here in Forbidden West you can feel that she's much more confident in playing the character, and that confidence translates to an excellent performance that really cements Aloy as one of gaming's best modern heroines. I'll probably write up a spoiler and lore discussion at some point because there's a lot to talk about, but for now I'll just say that fans of Zero Dawn's storyline will not be disappointed by this next chapter.

Outside of the main story, there is plenty to do across the world of Forbidden West. Sidequests return, now feeling like real parts of the game rather than just glorified fetch quests or machine battles you could use to familiarize yourself with the environments. While not every sidequest is a winner, there are some very fun standouts that made me want to see every single one of them. I especially loved the one in the desert that made you choose between two sides of a Tenakth civil war, and how the choice you made actually impacted the world going forward. More like that in Horizon 3, please. New distractions to Forbidden West include Machine Strike, a fun albeit overly complex board game you can mess around with, a great Mario Kart-esque racing minigame, hidden caves teeming with loot, and many more. I tried to see as much as possible on my first playthrough, partially because I remembered you got rewarded for completing certain sidequests at the end of Zero Dawn with several of those characters arriving to help fight at the battle for Meridian (unfortunately this fun detail isn't repeated here, but you do get several awesome rewards for completing sidequests instead like exclusive gear or cosmetics instead so they're still worth doing), but mostly because I just loved this world and wanted to keep the adventure going.

As someone who's loved Horizon ever since that first trailer played at E3 2015, I went into Forbidden West with impossibly high expectations. I'm very happy to say that my expectations were not only met, but exceeded. Everything from the big stuff like the story and gameplay loop to small things that didn't even need fixing like the way clothing buffs work and the yellow climbing handholds were vastly improved, creating an overwhelmingly fun and rewarding experience that feels like our first real glimpse into what the ninth generation of consoles is really going to be like. Yes, there are still things that could use a bit more spit and shine, but they are drops in the vast ocean of excellence that is waiting in the Forbidden West. I absolutely cannot wait to see how Guerilla concludes their masterpiece in a third game, however long that may take.

"When it looks impossible, look deeper. And then fight like you can win."

I could tell you about how repetitive, gratuitous, ugly, unfunny and just plain awful this game is, but instead I think it'd be more productive to give you a list of some other things you can spend your time on instead of playing My Friend Pedro.

-Clean the house
-Go for a relaxing nature walk
-Watch a movie
-Learn a new hobby
-Catch up with old friends
-Play literally any other video game

Hard to believe that this masterpiece is already 10 years old. Portal 2 is my favourite game of all time, and in my opinion it's aged beautifully, and is just as amazing today as it was back in 2011.

Everything about this game is perfect. The puzzles and game design are far improved from the original, throwing out the onslaught of bouncing ball puzzles in exchange for thought-provoking and exciting rooms that all feel unique. The story is perfect, building on the simple yet fun plot from the first game to create one of the most entertaining and witty narratives in all of gaming. The characters are perfect, from the returning GLaDOS to the new additions of Wheatley and Cave Johnson. The art direction is perfect, the music is perfect, the jokes are perfect, the secrets and easter eggs are perfect, it just all comes together beautifully. Portal 2 is one of those extremely rare pieces of art that accomplishes everything it sets out to do with flying colours. Plus, you can beat the whole thing in one sitting if you absolutely want to, making it the perfect game to revisit from time to time just to remind yourself that no game will ever reach this level of perfection again.

I should probably finish the multiplayer one of these days.

I mean, what else is there to say about one of the great games of our time? Mario Galaxy is a masterpiece, with pitch-perfect platforming, visuals that still look as beautiful today as they did in 2007, a stunning score that might be the best in all of gaming, and a surprisingly touching storyline for a Mario game (the franchise famous for never even having a storyline), there's just nothing in this game to dislike. Even the stuff that doesn't work, namely the rolling ball and manta ray stages, are little more than minor gripes in the grand scheme of things. This was my first time ever completing the game, and while I need a bit of a break before I dive back in as Luigi, I can safely say this was an amazing experience that I'm glad I went through. Although my favourite Mario game is still Odyssey, Galaxy will always have a special place in my heart.