wow this was fucking terrible. It's the same exact template from that AEW game.

I don't know what was I expecting honestly, that artstyle just makes a bad first impression. I guess I just expected the game to NOT be the same idle game just with another IP.

btw why all of these games take ages to load???

Tekken is a game about decades long family feud so here’s my story of Tekken-related patricide.

When I turned 6 my dad decided to gift me a Playstation 1. We weren’t rich so we bought it second hand. He found some guy willing to sell his console and we visited him together to make sure it works. I remember his room being cluttered and messy. I also remember the game he showed us first. It was Tekken 3. It blew our minds. Never have we seen 3D graphics that looked so detailed, so animated, so lively. Coming straight from shitty famicom clones it looked unbelievable. My excitement about graphics peaked right there and I’m still trying to catch that high. That dude sold us his stack of discs as well (I also remember a shitty Mission Impossible game), but really we only cared about the “game with brawls”. When we got back we played Tekken 3 all night long. That was maybe the most memorable day of my childhood.

Years passed and I “grew out” of PS1. I didn’t have a PS2 or PS3, I got into PC gaming instead, so the rest of the Tekken series passed near me. I played some T5 on friends’ PSPs (I even showed them how to do cool Law kickflips that still worked exactly how I remembered) but otherwise it wasn’t something I was particularly interested in anymore. I’m into “smart” games now, not those meathead fightings.

But my dad, it turns out, never stopped caring. Now living a pretty prosperous life he bought his new son a PS3 (we stopped living together by then) with, you guessed it, Tekken 6. And this time it was a deliberate ploy for him to REALLY get invested in fighting. He started maining Hwoarang, actually learning his moves, trying out online. I remember my lil bro’s excitement when T7 got announced for PS4 because he knew dad would WANT to play that one, so yet another birthday Playstation was imminent. In T7 he got addicted to ranked play so he got really good. The meme about 40yo old dudes playing Kazuyas perfectly wavedashing and putting you in nasty mixup is real, except it’s my dad, he’s 50 now and he’s Hwoarang.

And of course whenever I’d visit Dad's side of the family he’d invite me to play Tekken for old time’s sake. And since he got so good it’s gotten pretty miserable. I played a bit of T7 as well since it was on PC, but never on the level that invited understanding, just mashing here and there with friends. Of course it wasn’t enough against Dad’s Hwo. And whenever he’d perfect K.O my ass he’d laugh straight in my face. Look at the gamer son who can’t play fighting games! I very much gave up on reaching his level, I just accepted my beatings at occasional family gatherings.

That is until Tekken 8.

Something clicked with me in this game. Maybe it’s fantastic learning tools, maybe it’s yet again great graphics, maybe it’s Jun Kazama being an amazingly fun character, but it got its hooks deep in me. Now I know how to apply pressure, how to put an enemy in a mixup state. I understand the concept of taking turns, the difference between crush and evade, when to use my 13i and 10i punishes. I know my character’s moves and available tools. I’m actually learning.

My Dad of course also hopped on T8. He bought an entire new laptop for the game, justifying it as a working expense! And yesterday we finally got to play some sets.

These were my most nailbiting T8 matches so far. Turns out Dad doesn’t like it when I’m ducking his highs. He also can’t do much when it’s me who’s putting the pressure and forces the mixups. I put everything into this… and finally got him. We went 4-3. I defeated my Dad. I truly am the son of the Mishima family.

I dunno man, maybe showing a sad and dramatic pet-and-owner separation as a motivation to clear the game and then resolving it on the second level is a great example of terrible pacing.

B.ARK is like a kiddie-shmup. Like, a shmup you'd find on the back of a cereal box. It works, but it's not doing much for me and I don't want to get better at it when games like Hazelnut Hex, Blue Revolver, or any classic shmup that you could play on Fightcade exist.

I feel like the selling point of this is the 4-player multi-player, but I'm not really interested in playing this with anyone.

Between Ronald, the Hamburglar, Birdie, and the other McDonald Land characters, Grimace was always my favorite one out of the bunch. I thought he looked cool and he always gave off a friendly, wholesome vibe even if he was originally introduced as a villain. Upon hearing the news that McDonald's was celebrating Grimace's birthday, I was pleased because McDonald's has finally begun to start acknowledging the McDonald Land gang again, even moreso that they used my favorite character for their promotion.

The story is pretty much in the title. Its Grimace's birthday and he wants to celebrate, but his friends are missing and he has to go find them. Along the way, you collect as many shakes as possible for everyone who is attending the party.

It's both a platformer and a skating game. You go from point A to point B grinding on rails and collecting shakes in the process. Like some of the previous McDonald's games that came before it, it is an entertaining platformer. I'd list more of the positives, but for how short this game is there isn't much else to say.

My only problem with the game is as mentioned, it is too short. Around the time I thought I was halfway finished with the game, I saw the ending play and the credits roll. I came in expecting to beat it in at least 45 minutes to an hour, but it took me about 20 minutes and probably even less than that if I had to guess. I know its sole purpose is to advertise a limited edition milkshake, but I would have appreciated if they made it just a little bit longer.

In the end, it's a neat little promo they made and it shows that they put a lot more care & effort into advertising the Grimace shake than they ever needed to. Sadly, I never tried out the Grimace shake and it took me serveral months after the celebration for me to get around to playing this game. I may have been late to the party but I still got to celebrate the birthday of my favorite purple goofball from the McDonald Land crew.

Cry for the moon...

Entering the infinite void of what's beyond the thermosphere of our planet, we gaze upon her majesty. That moment we take in the supposed sanctuary of our mother goddess is where our unknowable enemy launches their sneaky surprise attack at the start of the round, we don't even notice there's two moons until it's too late. The imposter of our beautiful rock in the sky slowly approaches from the background as warning sirens blare through your speakers. I hope you're prepared fellow pilot, because it's only downhill from here when it comes to questioning what lies in front of your eyes.

The mechanics of your ship are shoddy and experimental at best, just as rough and rugged as the scenery you'll be digesting in your next trip through your shmup smorgasbord. The unknowable enemy will not make things easy with their positioning and method of approach, and your ship may be ill-equipped to deal with their lunacy and onslaught of Space Mambos. Persevere through it all and your Black Fly getting inevitably crushed and sandwiched between the ceiling and floor by a funny rascal, and you may just find yourself in a fight against a phantom phallus utilizing your own kind's history and imagery of what may be your childhood pet cat to drag you deeper into it's method of madness.

Once all is said and done, you will be led to wonder, were you dreaming or was it reality? Perhaps it's time to wake up...you were born to be free....

Wake up.

As a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with subways. Whenever my family and I traveled to a new city, my immediate fixation was not the city’s many attractions but rather the intricate infrastructure linking all these various locales. While my family handled the destinations, I handled everything in-between. I wanted to know the most efficient way to get from point A to B, if there were any loopholes or special conditions necessitating an off-the-beaten-path itinerary, and most of all, I kept tabs on any planned changes regarding the evolving transportation so I could make notes of where to adjust and prioritize for future trips. I never realized it back then, but there was a certain satisfaction to memorizing every station and optimal route and running the simulations in my head that eventually led me down the path of engineering.

Mini Metro is essentially my childhood fascination with subways conceptualized as a video game. It’s super easy to pick up thanks to its minimalist design and intuitive controls; passengers are depicted with geometric symbols headed to corresponding symbolic destinations, distinctly colored subway lines are constructed by dragging your mouse between stops, and you can easily manipulate existing lines without disrupting progress by simply clicking and dragging sections of a line to new stops. At the same time, it can quickly become challenging, but this skill ceiling feels fairly approachable because the game is less about memorizing specific formulas and more about understanding implicit guidelines. For example, having a line that hits every stop in the area sounds appealing, but what’s less appealing is how much more time is subsequently spent traveling and loading/unloading passengers; you can at least somewhat account for this by toggling specific stations as “no-stop” to create express lines. The AI is fairly predictable and will always calculate the shortest path to the corresponding destination, but this also means that there’s real potential for them to overload the capacity of certain stations while in-transit between different lines. Alongside this, the game is great at organically iterating upon its basic formula to escalate difficulty by introducing more stops, altering the shape of stops to create more unique passengers and necessitate different routes, and increase the system’s load with more passengers while forcing the player to juggle their already limited number of lines, cars/carriages, and tunnels/bridges as also dictated with newly unlocked maps. At its core, it’s a game that’s great at subtly teaching players how to recognize bottlenecks and micromanage individual elements to fully understand how minor changes can quickly ripple across the fully intertwined system.

My only real nitpicks are that picking apart subway loops can get a bit annoying since you can only fiddle with one exposed end at a time while in loop form; it’s a minor complaint considering that you can pause the game at any time to more carefully reconstruct lines, but adding extra steps to reconstruct common subway loops is fairly noticeable considering Mini Metro’s elegant interface. Also, I do wish that there was a way to construct slightly longer paths along rivers instead of automatically building across them between certain junctions and using up my already limited supply of tunnels and bridges. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that this last gripe is mostly personal, and I think this game absolutely delivers upon its premise with precise execution. With so many different maps and daily challenges to boot, there’s plenty of content to exhaust within the game, and if one finds the basic experience too stressful or is more interested in sheer experimentation, then they can simply turn to endless and creative modes instead. For an accessible yet deceptively deep management game that gives great bang for your buck, I’d say Mini Metro is a fantastic entry point into the world of optimization simulators that more than holds its own against its more daunting peers.