Is it just me or is anyone else getting some Tunic (2022) vibes from this? 🤔🤔

(seriously tho, an incredible game for 1991 that's not all too fun in 2024 for me. still very cool!)

HAPPY VALENTINE'S, SAMUS

I'm 100% convinced everyone who considers this one of the best games of all times forgot to play the Phazon Mines. THOSE WERE TERRIBLE. OH, and the bosses too.

But otherwise a very great game :). I honestly can't believe I waited from freshman year of high school to play this!...but 6 & 1/2 years later it still was a banger so oh well

2022

I am NOT kidding in the slightest when I argue that this is the most creative game I've EVER played in my life. It starts out as a little Zelda Dark Souls thing, but you don't know how to play? It just drops you in? What? And you can't understand the language? huh?? And then slowly but surely, Tunic reveals its hand to you, leading you inch by inch deeper into its secrets.

Every level and dungeon is so intricately designed. THE GAME MANUAL that you slowly find page-by-page is SOOO MIND-BLOWINGLY COOL. The fact that the developers created an ENTIRE FICTIONAL LANGUAGE just to recreate the feeling of playing NES Zelda as a child and not knowing how to read is INSANE. Slowly learning about features or mechanics that have been available the entire time genuinely made me FLIP OUT AT THE SCREEN.

And that's not even mentioning the crazy difficult but immensely satisfying bosses, the mind-boggling meta endgame puzzles, the LUDICROUS puzzles and hints and secrets that the community took years to track down, the GORGEOUS soundtrack I'm going to constantly be playing on loop, the (i am being fully serious right now) disturbing and shocking story revelations, the WILD speedrunning skips, or how even things like the CAMERA PERSPECTIVE get turned into a puzzle. THE CAMERA. THE. CAMERA.

I adore Zelda, but this game single-handedly goes out of its way to push more creative boundaries than Zelda has done in its ENTIRE existence. The only thing holding it back for me are a few stupidly hard puzzles and basically everything in the "true ending" path being obtuse as hell...I felt so guilty using a guide for some of that. BUT DESPITE THAT! It's so endlessly imaginative and EXACTLY the kind of thing I want developers to make. I'm probably gonna be thinking about this title for the rest of my life! And I played this for free?? FOR FREE? ON GAME PASS???

PLEASE PLAY THIS GAME. IT'S SO GOOD. I AM NOT THE SAME PERSON I WAS BEFORE TUNIC.

I didn't feel like finishing King of Cards but this is easily the best "retro" game on the market! So much charm, character, and content. Specter Knight was easily my favorite campaign.

Aw look! You can see the seeds that inspired Hades along with some stellar art direction! Wish there was any interesting story & characters or gameplay variety tho, because this is fun but it's got nothing that makes me wanna finish it, ya know?

Personally I think ALL marriage problems should be solved through an insane platformer experience hosted by a sexy Spanish book

It's REALLY cool to get some of the best courses from GBA, DS, and Wii back in the game! And the original courses are pretty sweet too! But that's around half of the package and you can't tell me you're gonna be picking shit like Tokyo Blur by choice 💀

I would be much more generous about these but ehhhhh the way cheaper visuals AND course downgrades at work here means it's always a "...but..." part you gotta be aware of. Really nice for variety alone, but when I'm intentionally skipping half of the DLC courses at all times can you really call it good?

Plus they didn't even include DS Airship Fortress or Wii Toad's Factory...wtf...

the concept is SO COOL but ultimately so much of the game just feels like busy work. maybe it gets good after the tutorial but idk

With OpenRCT2, this ends up accidentally becoming one of the best simulation games ever made. I spent like, 40 hours on perfecting my first theme park, and now I don't have any motivation to play more? Whoops. Really fun while it lasted tho, and I can EASILY see myself dumping way more time into this game when I've taken a break and am less overworked with college.

Uncharted's been in a weird place for a while. They're fun games and an easy showcase of the Playstation 3's power for Sony, but calling these titles "art" was always a little bit silly. They're fun adventure games with tons of spectacle and that's totally fine! But after Naughty Dog put out The Last of Us, a landmark title that's become one of the most respected games EVER MADE partially due to its dark, emotional core, how could Nathan Drake survive with the prestige the studio earned?

The answer, it seems, was to create EASILY the best plot in the series. Uncharted 4 won't win any Oscars but its grounded, emotional story about two brothers, obsession, and betrayal elevates it so much further than the bang bang shooty type stories of the previous games. The actors' performances, the animations, the writing....it's all SO GOOD. So many games have incredibly lifeless or inhuman or robotic characters but Naughty Dog hits it out of the ballpark EVERY TIME MAN.

And the graphics?? This game is SEVEN YEARS OLD but i'm still over here taking screenshots every five minutes!! It's so smooth and so pretty! (Granted I played the PS5 remaster so that might account for it but still). Say what you will about "photorealism bad blah blah blah" IDC THIS GAME LOOKS INSANEEEE!! And it feels so smooth to play too! The climbing, the action, the shooting. The shear amount of location and gameplay variety is out of this world, I don't even want to think about how many man-hours this took to build. And how much crunch, because, ew. Yay.

Really my only major critique is I wish a lot of the gameplay had more...substance? I was pretty tired of the gunplay by the end, and I wish its stealth and combat options were deeper. But even if Uncharted doesn't have the best combat, or the best climbing, or the best stealth, or the best puzzles, it's its ability to pace everything together into one full-steam-ahead blast of an adventure that helps it stick the landing.

Triple-A video games might be in a bad situation with variety, visual styles, development time, and actually being fun these days. But Uncharted 4 is proof that sometimes, the big expensive games can be worth keeping around too.

"Can we play Portal?"
"We have Portal at home."
Portal at home:

I wouldn't say I loved this but it's probably as good as a racing game could be so yeah. Looks pretty, plays smooth, has Gorillaz music. Personally I thought Mexico wouldn't be completely devoid of human life but hey you learn something new every day.

I don't even wanna THINK about how much work it took to make a game like this even happen. How did the pitch even get far? A 1930s cartoon gauntlet of bosses? How do these ideas even happen? And more importantly how did they execute SO WELL on an idea like this??

The only things holding it back are a few RNG elements that are pretty damn unfair and the Run n Gun levels uh, stink. But everything else is SO STELLAR. The sublimely gorgeous visuals and soundtrack, the snappy and responsive gameplay, the endless creativity that's always on display. There were NO CORNERS cut to match their vision, and the fact that Cuphead's become such a financial success makes me so happy. I want more games to be completely willing to commit to their insane vision, and Cuphead standing as one of the most impressive indie titles of all time has surely helped bring that mission forward.

2003

I GOT MAD SKILLS I GOT MAD SKILLS I GOT- I GOT MAD SKILLS I WILL GET WILD sexy bass riff starts playing

there is no greater feeling than realizing one of your childhood favorite games was actually even better than you remembered and is ALSO the greatest sports game of all time

I've always wanted to play a diet version of Persona 5 that runs at 20fps and looks like garbage! But the character writing is excellent and the combat is satisfying so I guess I'd put it around here. 30 hours in and I still wasn't interested in the story AND didn't even hit the timeskip, so I'm moving on to greener pastures.