I left this game feeling pretty underwhelmed, even as someone who expects that sorta thing from Kirby games. The franchise really hasn't evolved once ever since they discovered a winning formula with Super Star (26 years ago), and I was hoping that the pink puffball finally making his long delayed jump to 3D would be the push HAL needed to finally give Kirby the shot in the arm he needed. Instead, the Forgotten Land is still a good game, but it can't escape a strong feeling of missed potential permeating the entire experience.

Unlike Mario 3D World, which constantly one-ups itself with creative new ideas every single level so things don't get boring, Kirby more or less throws everything it has at you in the first world or so and then just kinda coasts for the rest of its playtime. None of the levels, enemies or bosses are memorable at all, the music is a complete nothingburger (except Roar of Dedede, now that's how you do a boss remix), and the interesting post-apocalyptic setting quickly devolves into the generic "beach world, snow world, lava world" archetypes that befall so many Nintendo platformers. There isn't even a cute little story like there is with some other Kirby games, hell I'd even accept the classic "bad guys steal Kirby's lunch" plot over the literally nothing we got here. In the end Forgotten Land has nothing to say, and ultimately just feels like HAL looking at what Mario's been doing for the last decade and trying to copy it without understanding what makes those games great. Don't get me wrong, it's still a good game and you'll probably have fun with it, but there really is no reason to play it when Mario 3D World is right there.

By all accounts, this game should not work nearly as well as it does. The graphics are some of the worst I've seen in a modern triple-A title, the music is unmemorable and repetitive, the story and characters are flat and uninteresting even by this franchise's standards, the open world is pretty empty, the tutorial is nightmarishly long, and running out of space in your bag and needing to grind menial tasks to rank up your Pokedex are a constant annoyance. And yet, in the end the sum turns out to be greater than its parts, and Legends Arceus winds up as a surprisingly fun time.

I think this game's greatest strength is just the novelty of a real-time Pokemon experience. While it's still not quite the open world dream we've always had, it's a welcome step in the right direction. Catching Pokemon just by walking up and throwing a ball at it without the need for a random encounter battle never stopped being fun. There's a great selection here too, lots of fan favourites are present. It's always fun stumbling upon something you haven't seen before and trying to figure out how to best go about catching it. The best are the rare alpha Pokemon, defined by their giant size and dark red auras. These guys will ruin your day when you first encounter them if you aren't careful, but coming back later when you're stronger to take them on and capture them makes you feel downright unstoppable. I do wish there were some more new Pokemon available beyond a couple of new evolutions, but I guess they're saving that for Gen 9 later this year. Battling has been streamlined to be faster than ever as well, there's no lengthy intro or end screen and most battles are decided in just one or two moves. Personally I never minded the constant stop-and-start of the classic Pokemon games, but I don't know if I'll ever really be able to go back to them after playing through Arceus. Overall a lot of QoL stuff has been improved, whoever decided to eliminate the need for Move Tutors or Name Changers by letting you do that whenever you want as well as have Pokemon wait to evolve until you let them once they hit the criteria is a genius. The guardian boss Pokemon fights were a fun surprise too, though I question why they didn't include a health bar for your player character in these encounters. Arceus wears its Breath of the Wild inspirations on it's sleeve, and while the game's negatives hold it back from ever truly reaching those heights, it's still able to recapture a bit of the magic.

But yeah, if you're looking for problems with this game, there's a lot wrong with it. You do get used to the crusty visuals after a while but overall I don't know what they were thinking with the art direction of this game. Everything looks way too bright and washed out, and there's tons of pop-in and low-poly textures. The story does pick up a bit towards the end but you won't remember it a week after playing, there's a lot of dialogue in this game but it never really seems to say anything. I will say though as someone who was a kid that was super into Pokemon during the D/P/Pt era I did get a kick out of seeing some Sinnoh history stuff brought to life. The tutorial at the beginning of the game is brutal as well, it's extremely sluggish, filled with exposition, and worst of all it traps you in a super small area with only a few species of Pokemon for like an hour. Thankfully the game picks up as soon as you're done with it but I wouldn't blame anyone who dropped it early because the tutorial is just so miserable. And oh my god, I don't think I've ever struggled with inventory management in an open world game as much as I did with this one, you never seem to have enough space and you can only upgrade your bag one slot at a time for an increasingly expensive fee. It's downright outrageous.

It's weird because when you really think about it Legends Arceus is kind of a mess, but I had a great time with it despite everything. It feels like Game Freak is inching their way towards realizing everyone's hopes and making that epic Pokemon adventure of our wildest dreams, and this is a big step in the right direction. I'm definitely more excited to see what Scarlet/Violet is gonna be like now.

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.

A buggy disaster that feels like it was rushed out the door to catch the You Can Pet the Dog in Insert Game meme before it stopped being relevant. Featuring missions that give you no hints on how to actually complete them, missions that still don't complete even after you fulfill their requirements, jokes and dialogue that feel like they were written by Reddit circa 2016, and dogs that would be cute if they weren't just static unmoving models bouncing around like beach balls, I was more than done with this after 45 minutes.

why I chose this to be the next game I played after finishing Horizon is somewhat concerning

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."

There are two games in here: one is an extremely solid dungeon crawler with a quirky sense of humour and a very fun transformation system, the other is a grindy nightmare that just feels like a long road to nowhere. While Nobody Saves the World is able to keep itself fresh for the first 10 hours, by the time you hit the last third the game has long overstayed its welcome and you feel ready to check out the final boss. The devs respond to this by instead slamming on the brakes and ruining the game's pacing by forcing you to grind boring, repetitive quests over and over again to inch your way towards unlocking the game's final dungeons. I strongly advise that whoever decided that 130 stars to unlock the last dungeons was anywhere near a fair amount when you get like 2 tops for completing a difficult quest should get their head checked. Definitely give it a try on GamePass because there is a lot of fun to be had here but don't be surprised if you find yourself burnt out by the end.

When buying a roguelike it isn't really a question of "Is this game going to be fun?", it's more a question of "How far can I progress in this before the devs start throwing bullshit at me and make it not fun anymore?" For Spelunky it took me until roughly my 300th attempt to get out of the jungle are before I started to get sick of it, but I was having a really good time up til then. It's a real good game, although I must say that I found the old adage of every Spelunky death being your fault laughably wrong considering I frequently spawned into rooms with boomerangs already being thrown at me.

Even though I swore long ago to never touch League of Legends, after watching the masterpiece that is Arcane I felt like I had to get another fix of that universe. As someone who loved Hearthstone back in its heyday I've been looking for something to scratch that itch for a while, and Runeterra turned out to be just the thing.

If your first few hours in Hearthstone are like your first swimming lesson in a kiddie pool, your first few hours in Runeterra are like your cousin pushing you off the high dive right into the deep end. There are so many cards and mechanics all introduced at once that eventually I just kinda decided the only way for me to not lose my sanity was to just roll with the punches and hope for the best. This is a game where experience is a much better teacher than any tutorial, and the more you play the more you learn what's really going on here. It's a lot of fun to crack, although it definitely seemed daunting to start. In the end it's definitely more nuanced and complex than Hearthstone, but after a few hours it finally clicked with me enough that I was able to build my own custom deck and get started on a winning streak with it. I don't know if I'll be as hopelessly addicted to Runeterra for years as I was with Hearthstone, but it's off to a good start.

Hard to think of a better way to start off a new year of games than playing through one of the all-time greats. While there are aspects of Mario 64 that have definitely aged poorly (the camera, plus Mario has his moments of clunky movement), what this game accomplishes being the first of it's kind is nothing short of phenomenal. I love the freedom you have to choose what worlds you want to visit or avoid, a typical playthrough for me involves 100%ing Whomp's Fortress, Big Boo's Haunt and Lethal Lava Land while only popping into Hazy Maze Cave, Tick-Tock Clock and Rainbow Ride for one or two easier stars. It's one of those games where you look around and just take in all the design decisions that went into creating each of the worlds and appreciate everything Nintendo did to create a game that is just as fun in 2022 as it was back in 1996. Even in it's most frustrating moments Mario 64 will always find a way to put a smile on your face, and I think out of everything in this game that's still my favourite part about it.

The first effort from new development studio Ember Lab, Kena caught my eye right when it was revealed thanks to it's lovely Disneyesque art style and fun looking combat. Now that I've finished playing through it, while it can be rough around the edges, it's still a very fun time that felt like a very fun throwback to adventure games in the GameCube era.

This game's visuals really speak for themselves, Kena might have the best art design of any game I've played this year. The lush forest environments with their deep green hues permeate the entire experience, and yet they never seem to get tiring. I especially loved the atmosphere when exploring caves, there were some parts of the game that really laid into those classic 3D Zelda vibes and that felt great. The exploration is really fun too, there's a few collectables hidden away in the environments that I enjoyed discovering when I ventured off the beaten path for a bit.

However, this game is far from perfect. It took about two thirds into the game before the combat system really clicked with me, and even then I still found it kinda frustrating at times. Limiting your healing abilities to just the consumable health pickups in the battle arena got very frustrating in some of the longer fights as I died over and over again simply because I got hit by a strong attack and had already used my heals. I also really wished that the map had a compass and waypoint system, while Kena's world isn't exactly massive I frequently had to keep checking and rechecking the map to ensure I was still on the right path to my objective. I would've really appreciated being able to set up waypoints that I could head towards. I found the story to be extremely weak and bordering on melodramatic at times as well.

Kena is nowhere near a perfect game, but that doesn't mean it's not worth your time. The fact that Ember Lab made something this solid as their first project is worthy of praise, and I'm excited to see how they take the lessons learned with Kena into their next project.

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