Coda clear | Playtime: 709h

Cleared the relevant achievements (aka the 10M run)

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I didn't have the best experience with this one.

The visuals and music are interesting with that strong synthwave theme, and the game controls are responsive and it plays fine. It's gimmick is that the levels are generated randomly and change daily. This helps keeping the game fresh, but also the random generation exposes itself wide open at the 7-8M score mark, where the hazards become so obnoxious that you are pretty much forced to move at snail pace, using the occasional ramp to score in ten or twenty thousand points at a time, thus turning the late game into a slog.

Unfortunately, at the time I've played this game, it is half broken and keeps freezing all the time after you restart while playing the two main competitive modes: Top Dog and Hardcore. The first mode isn't really much of an issue because you don't die too frequently, but the second one is actually unplayable.

The rest of the modes are seemingly working fine, aside from the occasional lag spike.

The textless menus are funny the first time you see them, but there are too many options and it's often unclear what they do or mean.

Other than that, it's a fun experience for the most part, but you can and will lose a run regardless of your extra lives if you didn't predict that there would be a slope nearby, so it can get frustrating fast if you try to score high since the runs are super long (or maybe I just don't know how to score).

All in all, it's an okay-ish free game, but still needs quite a bit of polish.

3000CC run. May try clearing a 1CC if I figure out how to lower the movement sensitivity.

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Almost boss rush-style shmup whose main gimmick is that it controls entirely with the mouse.

This allows for some crazy patterns that require really fast movement and you wouldn't see in most other games.

The controls though aren't that great; The movement is way too sensitive for the precision that some patterns demand. The game gives you a million of extends, but still it doesn't feel that good to play...

We destroyed Ashen Lao

All achievements | Ain Soph Aur mode cleared

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That's a great shmup right here.

An arcade run, which is around 15 minutes long, throws everything the game has to offer since the very first second.

You know how a lot of times in shmups, you have to go through the first 2 sleeper stages before the game gets serious on stage 3? Not the case here! It's impossible to get bored while playing Gundemonium.

There's quite the scoring toys in the game too

Got all the achievements

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GundeadliGne is a mythical creature in the form of an horizontal shmup where you can turn around.

The particular release (Steam) that I played has a really good soundtrack, and plays really well as with the other platine titles.

As per the game's difficulty, it's a bit weird:
The three characters are bizarrely spread in terms of balance. Eryth seems to be the weakest by far, at least from what I played with her. Elixirel is pretty strong in comparison, with a wide laser shot that deals fairly good damage and incidentally doesn't let you see the enemy bullets, and the ability to shoot both sides when fast tapping the shoot button. Finally, Nagi is actually broken, able to cheese the hardest difficulty as if it was nothing.

When it comes to the difficulty modes, playing on anything higher than Standard will be a serious challenge, as you stop receiving extends after defeating the bosses. Getting extra hearts via the Alter Breaks is tricky regardless of the difficulty though.

As far as secondary game modes go, Eternal Babel mode exists and Demonic Challenge is a fun excuse to revisit and master the bosses. The game also features online Co-Op, which sounds enticing but unfortunately I couldn't try, given how niche this game is and how far of the release date I played it.

All in all, it's a fine game by itself, but the weakest of the trilogy by a lot.

All achievements

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This game is straight up amazing.

It's a gimmicky shmup that plays like nothing I've played before.

The gimmick is that you have to kamikaze against the bosses before they timeout you, or you'll lose immediately. The stage 0 boss acts as a tutorial and is there to make you learn this the hard way if you didn't read the manual.

To balance the need for sacrificing your own extends, the game gives you a lot of them, and this turns Hitogata Happa into a management game at the highest difficulties.

The different characters are all very fun to play as and every single one of them has its own use. They are also quite well thought out and there's not one that I'd say it's particularly strong compared to others, as the strongest ones on paper usually have at least one aspect where they pale against others (platina for example, while being amazing for stages, is terrible at bosses and is quite expensive as well).

There's some extra modes which are fine and help to learn the ins and outs of each character, but the main arcade mode is the meat as it lets you go ham with the character order.

It's very advisable to learn the stage 3 milking to have an incredibly easier time clearing the game.

Cleared X Challenge in normal mode

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The collection itself is well put together with some really nice extras, and the soundtrack remixes are really good too. Although the Day of Sigma OVA could have had more audio options other than the english dub...

The X Challenge mode is such an interesting concept, especially when both of the bosses work really well together (spiral pegasus and neon tiger come to mind), and it's a fun time at least on Normal difficulty.

On Hard, stage 2 is a nightmare as expected, and the increased boss HP makes the whole thing a lot slower and not that fun.

Defeated the final boss

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Huuuuge step up from SMB 1 and 2.

The overworld allows you to "save" your progress by opening shortcuts after you clear a fortress, or use certain specific items from the roaming enemies. Big positive change compared to restarting the entire world in SMB 2 or the aberration that is restarting the whole game in the original SMB. The iconic flag poles were removed, and that's OK.

The levels go from your usual plain / sidescroller / underground mario levels, to some very gimmicky levels where you will get big or small, traverse pipe mazes and a long etc. You can even anchor the boss airships to the ground to prevent they from fleeing! This is by far the best part of the game.

The controls / physics, on the other hand, are akin to the other two previous Mario games, and the inertia they introduce turn the level design into a frustrating experience from time to time. That's the main reason I didn't love the game as much.

Earned all the Default stage achievements.

Normal mode Type A 1CC (2352600). Moderate mode soon?

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Fun game, if only a bit hard on the eyes.

Manually took the new compendium entries, plus the 4 lynel weapons I missed from the other playthrough | 96 Shrines cleared | 177 korok seeds found | 32.51% map completion
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This playthrough proved to me that Master Mode should have been part of the base game, given that barely changes anything.

There's only 3 points in time where it mattered: The great plateau is now brutal, as the enemies are upgraded, heal over time and early weapons suck. This can be mitigated somewhat with an early game Phantom set.

As you progress a bit and the weapons "evolve", it'll be much better and similar to the regular BotW experience.

Second. The final boss is now much more punishing and scarier, as a final boss should be.

And last, the sword trials are insane and show that they didn't have them in mind while designing the master mode.

Pending is the champion's ballad and the rest of the shrines, but that will be left for another decade.

While the actual picross are fine (we will talk about free mode later), a lot of the aspects of the game barely work, or not work at all.

Picross DS sounds like a perfect time to make use of the console's touch screen, and considering that picross and touch controls is a match made in heaven, it would be a great idea. But the truth is that the board wastes so much space that they had to add a zooming feature, which in turn makes touch controls a bit annoying and you will want to use the buttons instead.

Next. Each of the levels have a specific theme, with custom colors and sound effects when squares are marked. This sounds neat in theory, but in practice, the board background and the unfortunate color choices make the marks really hard to see, being normal level 10 one of the biggest offenders (did someone actually playtest this?), so you will want to turn that off if you appreciate your eyes (thank god it can be turned off). In the end this is another non-feature.

Daily picross is a bit weird in that it rates your time on a daily basis depending on how you do on the different gimmick-based boards, but the difficulty on those is so wonky that it doesn't quite work. Maybe one day you get a board that can be solved in 30 seconds, but on the next day you get a really tricky one that takes you 3 minutes.

Now let's talk about free mode. Free mode doesn't count your mistakes, and the game warns you that some puzzles may be unsolvable by pure logic, so that's why they present a feature to workaround it. This sounds worse than it actually is, because in my experience, most of the boards where this applies could be solved with a simple enough 50/50 guess, but there were 2 or 3 problematic boards.

Regardless of this, guessing games on a picross game is just a terrible design choice in my opinion, and while they make the puzzles more difficult, it's the wrong kind of difficulty.

Finally, let's talk about my favorite part: the bonus minigames.

Who the fuck thought that hitting the touchscreen for 20 seconds straight trying to touch some blocks that move insanely fast and have an erratic pattern would be fun? Or hitting each square of a 4x4 block (that disappears for more time that you'd want to) 10 times until they break, and on a time limit? The copy minigame was at least remotely fun tho, but thankfully they are completely optional and aren't required to unlock the extra levels, because otherwise that would have been very unfortunate...

TLDR: The puzzles are good (mostly), but literally everything else the game tries to do fails.

100% items and map | Level 16 | Time Attack: 03:38:58 (A Rank) | Played on hard
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Jack Bros. 2 aka peak Shin Megami Tensei content.

I love that this little game, which was initially announced as a joke, exists, even if it's as short as it is.

The gameplay itself is quite decent, but it severely suffers from relying too heavily on mashing the attack button.

t's a metroidvania-styled game with a lite take on the bullet hell genre, where the enemies will throw fire and ice based patterns and the player has to alternate between the two characters in order to avoid (or rather block) them.

The music is also very cool, and controlling jack frost always makes me happy :D

All the 168 plus the weekly puzzles solved | 5910 picarats | 265 coins found | Password: 1A3E6B6E

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This entry keeps all the Layton charm, features an interesting take on a time travel plot with its touching moments, and serves as a proper finale to the original Layton story. It is also my favorite in the trilogy.

The world is fun to explore, the puzzle variety is great and the qol features are better than ever.

Unlike the previous games, the optional mini-games are much much better (although trickier to solve) this time around. Unfortunately, better doesn't always mean good, and even if they now are proper mini-games, I didn't enjoy the parrot levels very much. On the other hand, I loved the car, and the sticker book was fun too.

This is peak Layton right here.

All the 154 plus the weekly puzzles solved | 5410 picarats | 205 coins found | Password: 4E2A0F1A | Password 2: 1B8D5C0A

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Diabolical Box introduces the much needed memo feature, something that was really needed on some of the previous game's puzzles.

It was fun to explore several different locations for a change of pace, but the main location, despite how nostalgic can feel, isn't as charming as the village was in the previous entry.

This, plus the fact that the story mostly holds together because Katia is mute for 90% of the game, and the not so memorable puzzles (plus the disappearing act series of puzzles. Seriously, I didn't enjoy the last 2 at all), make me prefer the first entry a tad bit more.

The minigames were still just there like in Curious Village, with the Tea Set being particularly annoying because it relies on the NPCs deciding when they want to drink something. Still, since they are just an extra, it's not really too important.

Don't know what else to say. It was a fine game.

Finished W-17 (credits)

100% Noise Report with every enemy defeated at level 1 and every drop obtained | 100% Pin Mastery | 100% Item Collection | No food consumed except for bravery-related and 2 shadow steak ramen (to max out shop level) | All thread abilities unlocked | Final Time Attack (Ultimate): 18'36"63 | Final Time Attack (Hard): 8'22"58 | ESP'er Points do NOT exist

===
The World Ends With You is a great game with rock solid soundtrack that makes a fun use of the DS features. Its creative combat system will have you drawing patterns on the touchscreen or blowing into the mic while you control a second character at the same time with the D-pad.

The game also tries to be as portable-friendly as it can; the way the chapters are split into days, and the mingle and shutdown leveling system lets you easily stop playing after a short amount of time, and keep making progress even then (although you mileage may vary).

As fresh as the combat may feel, it suffers from a very long learning curve that may push some people away if they aren't willing to learn at least the basics. However, once you do, and get used to the two screens, it's actually surprisingly fun.

The pin mechanics, on the other hand, are really cool. There's enough variety on gestures so that you can choose the ones that are easier or you feel more comfortable using, and the brands potentially doubling their strength makes any pin actually viable on the normal difficulty, and greatly enhances the utility of the top pins when tackling the highest difficulty.

Only the evolution system holds it back a bit, this is because the game isn't very clear about how it works, and even after mastering a pin with the "wrong" points, it doesn't really keep track of which kind of points you used, forcing you to rely on an external guide or documenting it yourself if you don't want to go insane.

My biggest gripes with the game are the kinda repetitive overworld and the little variety of reaper tasks to a lesser extent, and the game over screen to a bigger extent.

The game over screen is, in my opinion, one of the game's biggest flaws, if not the biggest. When you get a game over, you'd expect to be able to manage your pins so you could quickly change your strategy after having learned how the boss attacks, but instead, your only options are to simply retry the battle, retry on easy mode, or exit to the main menu, with the consequence of potentially losing a good amount of progress since you have to save manually.

Finally, the game does a good job keeping its story interesting the whole time, and it has some good moments, but i think the overall message would have hit harder if i had played the game in my edgy teenager days.

Defeated the final boss

All the 135 plus the weekly puzzles solved | 5228 picarats | 182 coins found | Password: 8A6C5D0D

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Packed with charm ever since the first cutscene, this game is only really held back by the repetitiveness of the first St. Mystere locations, some really evil puzzles (not too many of them fortunately), and the lack of some quality of life features like taking notes during puzzles; Something that you really miss if you come back from the following entries.

Also, the minigames are just OK; nothing too memorable, but at least they unlock some puzzles once finished.

Still, it's a great game and one heck of a start for the Layton series.

Finished the 2nd quest (Sypha's path).

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I did not like this game very much. It felt like a shitty overtuned "difficulty enhancement" hack for Akumajou Densetsu.

It seemed as if they had tried to remove every little element that made the original fun, and replaced it with bullshit. Like taking away the ability for Grant to throw daggers, making him pretty much unusable for boss battles (although he's still half decent for stages), or respawning you 3 or 4 rooms back if you die against the final boss (literally why).

They introduced the flying skulls on the 2nd quest, which made every level they were in 10 times worse than it should be because of their stupid random flying pattern, and all the bosses received buffs too.

The buffs to bosses weren't actually that bad. In fact, most of them were welcome (except for doppelgänger, fuck him and the level he's in), because most of the battles were very easy to cheese in Akumajou Densetsu and they instead felt like a reward for clearing the stage rather than a last challenge.

Even though the bosses were overall harder, Dracula was actually made easier in this version, which was funny. Well, they made the 2nd and 3rd phases stronger, but the 2nd is still very easy, and the 3rd is scripted, so once you learn how to kill him, you can kill him every single time. The first phase now despawns the big fire pillar very quickly, so he is easier because it's unlikely that he will trap you between the fire and the wall like he did in Akumajou Densetsu.

My last point is that some of the changes are just badly implemented, because while you could complete a run in the original game by using only one of each of the other playable characters (e.g. by changing to Alucard the moment you unlock him and then completing the rest of the run only with him), the changes they made to the 2nd dracula phase make it very hard, or almost impossible, to defeat with Grant or Alucard for example, which left a bad taste of a poorly tested product in my mouth.

Played every stage and finished the 2nd quest (Note to self: avoid Alucard's path at all costs on future replays). Completed a "solo" run with each of the characters (Grant > Sypha >> Trevor >>>> Alucard fite me irl).

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The first levels are excellent (that clock tower and mad forest music right at the start of the game), but as you keep playing, the game starts revealing its true nature with the bullshitty level design (if a level contains gargoyles, an auto scrolling section, or falling blocks, it's guaranteed nasty).

The second quest brings it to the next level by putting enemies in the worst places ever and spawning gargoyles, medusa heads and bats as soon as possible just to spite you.

Even though I didn't find the second quest very fun to play through, the rest of the game was pretty good, improved over basically everything from Castlevania 1, and was super satisfying to clear.

Got the best ending, although there are items and sub-weapons I haven't figured out yet lol.

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This game is a gem. It may look like a mess because it is one, but implementation aside, the features it adds (like the day-night cycle, the early metroidvania feel, or the multiple endings), put it way ahead of its time.

The first contact with the game was a bit catastrophic (I didn't really know what to do, or what some items like the white crystal did), but once I started grasping how the game worked, it was a good experience.

Once I finished the game (didn't take me that long because I randomly watched a longplay a few years prior playing it and still remembered some bits here and there), I tried to go for the best ending.

Drew a basic map of the overworld, took some notes about where to find the items and how many hearts they costed, and planned a route around the day-night system. It was actually a lot of fun!

All things said, I'd love to rate this game a bit higher, but I won't because of how nasty the first run was.

Cleared the game a bunch of times in a row. Ended up in like stage 70. Also cleared the 1st quest without having to continue.

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Honestly, it's way better than what I was expecting, and it's short enough that you can just pick it up and start playing whenever.

There are two bosses that prevent me from loving the game though: Frankenstein and Death.

Both of them are insanely hard to beat with the whip alone, and are extremely easy to cheese with water, making their battles feel not very good either way.

The rest of the game is pretty cool on the other hand. A couple levels have sadistic level design (the water cave on 2nd quest comes to mind), but the game is very enjoyable anyway.

We got all the stars.

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It's as fun as it sounds. There were quite a bit of camera bugs though, especially when cannons and pipes were involved.

Cleared both routes with Richter, and the alternate route with Maria (the latter without ever getting a continue)

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This is the first classicvania that I properly finish and it was a good game, but the final boss was a bit of a letdown because of how easy it was after the 3 previous bosses. The visuals are great and the music is pretty cool too.

I think I'm going to appreciate PoR better after having played this game.

Cleared the 18 stages with both characters. Achieved a 12 perfect streak on 1-1 somehow.

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It's a short but fun to play game with cute artwork and cool music.

I really like these modern NES games because how different they look and play compared to the older commercial games.

Beat the post-game in hard/classic.