my honors biology class was my first period freshman year, and my teacher openly hated teaching freshman. he only taught honors bio because the school forced him to teach one period of it to justify him teaching upperclassmen in AP biology. this was very obvious to everyone, especially my class who he never taught anything to. instead he would post one question he copied off a random quizlet onto the board, let us copy the answer from the same quizlet, and then give us the rest of the period free.

needless to say, we did nothing productive or educational. super smash flash DOMINATED that classroom, and i remember my friend dennis kicking my ass in every single match we played together. it was so unfair. i dont really care for smash much outside of as a party game, and the controls on this sucked especially if you were playing on the same shitty, tiny laptop. fond memories, though.

i should have done this a long time ago, but i finally decided that as a self-proclaimed rogue-like enthusiast, i should actually play the game that introduced the genre.

it's a turn-based ascii dungeon crawler that uses a lot of text-based inputs to progress. it's really simplistic in presentation and truthfully, it is simple in gameplay as well (despite how much more complex it may seem as thanks to the lack of tutorial and long list of commands). it was... fun? but i've definitely been spoiled by the roguelikes of modern day. i played a few runs, never really did particularly great, and i doubt i'll ever really come back and try to progress super far. i will say though, that this brought back a lot of really fond memories of making my own text-based choose your own adventure dungeon crawler in high school when learning to code. overall, just happy to finally have experienced it!

I really wanted to like this game. I love roguelikes and I've had this one on my steam wishlist for a loooong while. I finally picked it up and I feel disappointed.

The gunplay in this game feels very reminiscent of revita and enter the gungeon, two really great games, but unfortunately the actual feel of the shooting is so awkward. the starting weapons don't just feel weak, they are boring and unfun. the few weapons i've unlocked and tried in my short experince with this game were equally unfun and uncomfortable to control. games like the binding of isaac provide a healthy balance right from the start, with cool unlocks being available from the very beginning with an equal amount of shitty items to balance it out. you can get lucky and have broken runs with brimstone or you can get stuck with tammy's head from the very beginning, but almost every upgrade will still feel like an upgrade. this is something neon abyss did not do well for me.

i have a few more issues with this game, too. the enemies are, frankly, not difficult ones just unfair and that largely is because of another issue i have with this game (we will circle back to enemies): the environments. every room just feels wayyy too big. most of the time, when you enter a chamber/room you cannot see everything, including enemies that have spawned into the level. this means random bullets spawning at you and enemies that peek, shoot, and then hide and teleport somewhere else in the room. it is so tedious and feels so slow to clear because of it. the level design is just unfun. everything in this game just boils back down to unfun. the combos in all the promotional material looks interesting and they have good concepts i like but havent made use for (you can disable individual items from appearing in runs if you hate them this much) but it is just too much of an unfun slog to get there.

quick side tangent: the buddy/egg hatching system is... it exists? i didnt hate it, but the infrequency of the hatches feels so lame. you just have to carry this trail of famiiars that do nothing. the hatches never felt significantly impactful. if done right, i think that protecting these akin to something like the lost soul item from the binding of isaac (familiar that you must protect each floor that will give an item upon progression) would work much better but otherwise is just so unsatisfying.

i WANT to like this game. the art is great and the mood of the environments feels cool, even if i think their tech aura is a bit corny. maybe one day i will revisit this and try to enjoy it, but as of now it is just not worth it when there are so many other amazing indie roguelikes that can provide you with so much more bang for your buck.

this one is tough to rate because I feel like you can leave it dissatisfied after a few hours and still think to yourself that maybe if you gave it a little big more time, you'd come around and enjoy it. cultist sim is a resource management style game that's primarily text based with lots of room for personal strategies and interesting mechanics but unfortunately this game has so much that it gives you right off the bat, the amount of content is almost to its detriment. the stories on the cards you unlock are interesting, but the way the minigames are paced means it is hardly possible to really take a moment to stop and read/think/immerse yourself in the stories being told to you. maybe i'm an idiot or something, but i felt like i was just playing with my brain off and being thrown so much all at once with no time to slow down. couldn't vibe with it but i tried.

when you decide to play cooking mama, you know what you're getting and this one isn't really any different.

there are a total of 60 dishes in the main gamemode, dojo/time trial levels upon silver medal completion, and 31 minigames that are not always cooking related (completing a dish unlocks a new minigame every so often). i played through every single minigame and main dish, and 100% gold-medaled all the main courses. i played some courses in dojo mode, but ultimately it was just doubling my time with this game for no reason so i stopped.

the main courses are OK. they are classic cooking mama, and are fun for a while before you realise there are a handful of techniques/cooking games they cycle between. there is a big issue with some unclear instructions or shoddy inputs that mean going for 100% is tedious. i discovered a trick in which if you know you are going to get a bronze/silver on a step during the dish, you can press start and quit and try the step again with no consequence on your score as long as the finished sign doesn't pop up which helped a lot. i think without it, i would have given up on going for full golds just because of how long the recipes get later in the game. if you enjoy cooking mama, this is no different. its fun, but after the first 10 recipes it really wore me down.

the minigames are... there? they exist? i dont know why they do, but they are definitely in the game! there are 4 separate categories of minigames being: help mama, harvesting, help mama's shop, and... studying? there are studying minigames where you solve basic arithmetic in thrilling gameplay like "1 + 1 = ?" and u are asked to fill in the missing numbers. this is a kids game, so i guess it makes sense to have them, but even for a child they are just so boring. there isn't a fun caricature of mama, it's literally just math problems on your ds. the other minigames are mostly fine like in the mama's shop portion, which has minigames like scooping ice cream for customers, taking orders and being a waiter, etc. they are a lot like old flash games, and are genuinely not bad. in help mama, you do household chores for her like sorting her thread spools, feeding her pet fish, and nursing baby birds to health. idk. its fine. the harvesting ones are about the same level of quality as the mama's shop games, and are pretty okay. playing catch to harvest fruit, sorting out green and red apples, collecting seafood from enemy crabs. they're okay and i played them all once or twice. the only real reason to play them is for what they unlock which is : decorations for mama's backdrop during the main courses and the main menu screen. that's... it. you don't even unlock the fun decorations after beating it/getting a perfect score. you have to get a perfect score on the minigame i think 3 times??? before you get a prize. its supposed to incentivize playing the minigames more, i understand, but it is so tedious if you DO want to unlock everything that there isn't really a point. the minigames are just kind of stupid. i didn't like their existence but i'm also probably not the target audience so who really cares in the end.

the final part of this game comes from the dojo or the time trial editions of the main recipes. once you beat the main recipe with a silver or gold, you unlock the dojo version of the dish. this mode means making the dish under a much tighter time constraint that generally doesn't allow for mistakes, which is actually a fun way to play the game. it is a lot more stressful, and definitely more annoying to 100% because of the timer aspect, but i liked playing a few levels of it. i already know that some recipes will be hell if you wanted to do it because of their tedious steps (the entire chicken tender/nugget recipe) (the step where you have to measure out foil/wrap for the food that brought nothing but pain and annoyance because of how sensitive the ranges are), but it was really fun. im not sure if this mode has a set of unlocks, but i beat a dish with a gold medal rating and it gave me nothing so... im going to assume you dont get any prizes. this was more fun for me than the base recipes, but it is also the same exact thing. i like challenges, and some of these levels were genuinely difficult with the close timings of them, but it was great! easily the best part of the experience for me.

so why did i play this game. did i even like it? to answer: i have no real clue. i like cooking mama, but actually beating everything was a chore. 60 recipes and their respective dojo levels AND the 30ish minigames on top of that is a lot to do, with little variability in the core dishes. you will experience the same egg cracking minigame a thousand times and it will be 0.1% less fun every time after that. i had a blast with the first 15 recipes, and then i thought "i must be halfway done." then i kept unlocking, and unlocking, and unlocking. maybe don't be like me and try speedrunning completion.

my rating of this game is: Just O.K.

okay technically... i didn't play this, and i also don't think is:
a) very fun
b) much of a game in the first place

but im still going to rank it, count it as played, and use it as an excuse to talk about a very special thing that is close to my heart; gambling <3

just joking, kind of. i'm going to use this to talk about pachinko as a whole, but mostly because i have some COMPLICATED feelings on it. i mean really, this game was oddly enough one of the things i was most excited to play for like the past year? some context: i went to japan this summer! wow, crazy, i know. it really was a special trip for me, and i was looking forward to going for literal years (thanks, pandemic, for letting this booked trip sit in the void for 3+ years), and before going, i found out this existed. however, thanks to the fact that this game is from the early 2000s and all the information circulating comes from ONE article that is in japanese, i thought it was a REAL pachinko machine. i knew that my chances were slim since osomatsu is not at all very mainstream in japan, but i was really hoping i'd get to go to a pachinko parlor and play it. not to mention, i am super fucking cringe and i really wanted to play pachinko cause the matsuno sextuplets do it a lot in the anime, lol.

so, after like 2 days of being in japan, we get to kyoto and i spent the evening alone with this guy who would eventually become my boyfriend a week after i go back to the USA, and we decide that we're going to go play pachinko. me, because i wanted to see what all the fuss it was about, and him, because gambling seemed fun and he brought a shit ton of spending money lmao. once we entered the pachinko parlor, i realized a couple things.

1) i could not fucking hear myself think
2) wow, that is a lot of older men. i am so out of my element here
3) while there is anime, osomatsu is DEFINITELY not going to be here

we walked around before picking a random cheap 1 yen a spin machine and it was. ridiculous. the lights were so bright and the noise was overwhelming and giving me insane sensory overload. we sat next to each other, literally less than a foot apart, and still i had trouble hearing his voice when he raised it to talk to me. not to mention there is... no instructions. well, scratch that, there ARE, but they were entirely in japanese. i knew vaguely how this worked (spin slots with metal balls and trade those in for cash) but actually seeing all the dials and the screens and just everything was different entirely. you basically pull a lever that reminds me of pinball and send one of your metal balls zooming across a pachinko board where it'll fall into various holes, and depending on the hole might activate the screen where you will do a slot spin & potentially win money. if you get the screen to light up, the machine does a FUCKING RAVE and blares music loudly. combine this with the hundreds of machines in a tiny, tiny room, it's maddening.

i didn't really win for a while, but i didn't really care. it was a cool experience. my friend did (and a lot) and eventually after a little bit one of the older men who i guess was working the floor realized we were foreigners and entirely lost, so he walked over, hung around, and tried to instruct us on how the machines worked, how to win, etc. with gestures and pointing. it was a cool moment, i don't really know how to describe it. we ended up getting the hang of it, and i tapped out at 1000 yen (something like 7 dollars), but i ended up leaving with 5000 total (like 40ish dollars). it was... honestly kinda boring LOL. it was cool having all the lights going and just experiencing everything go for a bit, but sitting at the machine, holding a single lever down and just spacing out while the metal balls clinked around and played on their own was mind-numbing.

a few days later when we went to another part of japan (i want to say it was in yokohama, but i honestly can't remember), 2 of my other friends who hadn't gone to play pachinko wanted to join my boyfriend and i since we had already done it, so we said sure and went again. i only spent 1000 yen again (and i lost it all), but this pachinko parlor was HUGE. there was like 7 floors, two connected buildings, and probably like a thousand machines on one floor alone. there was re:zero, evangelion, fate/grand order, and loads more anime but... no osomatsu. it was cool to try and play some of the more gimmicky ones, but we got bored and left early. i don't think i even spent all of the 1000 yen i set to gamble with, which all brings me to my point of:

pachinko isn't fun. you only play it if you want to gamble, and even then, i can think of so many more fun ways to do it. so imagine taking away all the lights and the atmosphere of a bustling pachinko parlor with friends, and putting a fake machine that you play alone in your living room in poor quality on a ps2.

yes, you don't lose any money, but it's so pointless. the animations were cute, i admit, and i would have loved playing this machine in person, but playing it at home is just. lame. its somehow more soulless than gambling already is. i guess that isn't the fault of osomatsu-san (well, osomatsu-KUN and not -san), but it still just feels so uninspired. i think the tie-in makes sense considering every other episode has some reference to pachinko, but it's just. sad to sit and watch gameplay of this. i can't imagine spending 40 usd to play pachinko alone at home. i just, don't get it, i guess.

anyways, if you read this, thanks i guess. i hope you enjoyed a look into my japan experience for a few minutes of your life.

im not gonna lie, i have attempted to log this game dozens of times. how do you rate a game you fell in and out of love with? especially when it changed your life? its fun. it sucks. the balance is horrendous. ive never felt happier than duoing with a friend in comp. the update to ow2 was better. i miss playing tank duos with random people. this community is terrible. i met my best friends because of this game. i miss goats. the devs did what they could for this game. they didnt do enough. i hate the league. owl was the best part of this game.

i love overwatch.

if youre like me and only boot up the sims because building houses are fun, you will love this game. my one complaint is very subjective but also is enough to diminish how much i like it: the game is so fucking ugly. that shouldnt matter but to me it does. i dont like decorating my houses nearly as much as just sandboxing in the sims because the overall furniture is ugly and the textures are this weird uncanny realism (the wood in particular is offensive). this is not constructive, which is something i try to be when i leave negative reviews but thats really the only reason i dont play this game. i like the indepth house plans and the ui and the feeling of really building up each house you buy/renovate, it's just... ugly.