This dopey trout has three pairs of underwear and five hundred journals. What are you writing about? Swamp ass?

What's fairly interesting to me about this game is the ambient storytelling explored as you progress through the acts. What the faceless and wordless protagonist chooses to bring with her and return to as she travels through time, and the wear & tear they each experience as they cling to their passions through young adulthood. A fresh new undecorated house offering you free reign to personalise as if you've just bought a new Habbo Hotel apartment would often be preceded by a move with roommates, where the living space is shared and belongings need to be negotiated and respected. Unpacking really can be surprisingly stressful for a game that purports itself to be a zen little experience.

What ultimately holds the game back for me is the bizarre rules you're made to follow before a level counts as clear. As the last box is unfurled, red highlights activate throughout the house and they rarely ever seem to be for good reason - you can't even leave mugs on coasters.

Fans of Halo and Street Fighter have a lot in common - put ten of them in a room, and you'll get ten different opinions on what the best game in the franchise is.

I think the game you like the most from a franchise is a function of time and place rather than quality and content. I'm a diehard for Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike, and it's undoubtedly because it's the one I played a ton of it on the original Xbox with my friends in the year following Daigo's straight-finessed blowup of EVO 2004; if I'd come to it cold-turkey on a Fightcade emulator in 2017 or whatever, I doubt the game would be able to hold me at all, despite its inherent 2D magic. I can look past its flaws - of which there are quite a few - because they're being covered up by falling rose petals of epic parries and hard-won comebacks.

Halo 3 is my favourite Halo game - exquisite graphics, a solid weapon roster, a campaign full of memorable "epic" moments and a flawless "it just works" multiplayer mode that highlighted every new strength of the Xbox 360. I played it religiously in the dying days of my teenage years, when time was plenty and money was scarce and I could give a good game the respect it deserved. With Halo 3, I couldn't have asked for more - it's been 14 years now, and I can still remember specific moments in time from that game like I'm watching them in Theater Mode in the present.

Ask the older boys on my hometown street what the best Halo game is, and they'd probably yearn for the perfect simplicity of the Halo: Combat Evolved pistol play, or champion the revolutionary nature of Halo 2's dual-wielding dual-protagonists and never-done-before online play. My old work colleagues might advocate for Halo Reach's gut-wrenching, grit-writhing story or the inclusion of cherry-picked gameplay elements from the juggernaut that was early-2010s Call of Duty (I thought that Reach was my favourite Halo, but replaying it in the Master Chief Collection revealed that the game's attempt to be a COD-contemporary has curdled it like blue space milk). Some jazz-loving freaks who read the Halo books might even try to convince you that ODST was The One. And someone, somewhere, is no doubt extolling the virtues of Halo 4 and Halo 5 - though it ain't me, nor anyone who I can find on Backloggd. They're definitely out there, though. Like the Street Fighter fans who swear down that EX 3 was the best one.

These subjective perceptions of Halo's appeal is why a Halo with the title Infinite was always gonna be an impossible ring for any game developer to jump through. It kinda feels like Halo Infinite has always existed as a sort of back-handed joke and a cack-handed game; a seventh-generation relic from a bygone era of shooters, hopelessly playing catchup with Fortnite, Apex Legends, and its old rival, Call of Duty. Infinite's botched reception last year was, of course, downright cruel - but also emblematic of how players have come to regard post-Reach Halo: a franchise that can no longer please anyone.

After a few days of Halo Infinite's multiplayer, I think it's safe to say that they somehow found a way to please everyone across 20 years of Halo history. It's funny - most people I've played with so far have a Halo backstory that they wanna share with their fireteam - "Oh, I really liked Halo 3..." ; "hmm I think my last one was 4?" ; "Yeah they added sliding in Halo 5, it was pretty cool." ; and so on - but no matter their origin story, my headset usually lights up with plenty "AWW YEAH"s and "AWW FUCK YEAH"s within a minute or two of the Slaying getting underway.

I'm not sure what it is exactly that's working for everyone, but Infinite seems to be this very delicate blend of every Halo that came before - there's the power items from 3, the sprinting from 4, the armor stuff from Reach, the out-there soundtrack decisions of ODST (overwrought Mogwai/Imagine Dragons post-rock for Halo is a cool choice imo) - but none of it takes centre-stage in a dominant, overbearing way. It just feels good to be a spaceguy with a spacegun and drive a spaceship. The classic Halo shit, with a little bit of Quake III and Unreal Tournament's item spawning thrown in for good measure this time - could Infinite fill that wafer-thin market slice that's been crying out for a new arena shooter? One that doesn't involve dying every 10 seconds to guys who've been playing every day since 1999? Anything but another ADS military shooter, please.

For me, the mark of a good multiplayer game is that even repeated death is fun - and repeatedly running in fear from an xX_Xx-tagged pro gamer Spartan with a gravity hammer prompts just as many "HAHAH OH SHIT!! DUDE" moments as getting a killstreak with a Ghost does. 343 may have rediscovered the essential Halo energy that permeated the Bungie entries.

... In multiplayer, at least. It does feel a little weird to heap praise on what is essentially a glamorous beta test for the online mode. I know nothing at all about the campaign, apart from the fact it's some huge Halo of the Wild open world thing with Master Chief going back to the halo rings yet again. I will probably play it, get bored of following waypoints and climbing towers, and then put it back on the shelf - such is the power of GamePass Gaming! But I could see myself sticking around for Infinite's multiplayer - god knows I'll have to if I ever wanna unlock anything.

Note: Been playing Smash competitively since 2007, won't be covering the casual aspect of this game.

Since the very first day this game was announced, I felt sceptical about it. All the talk about the game was exclusively the implementation of rollback netcode, and movement options like air dashes and wavedash (and of course "funny spongebob does Melee techniques meme"), both of which were great for the marketing of the game, and the timing was perfect.

Smash players have been disillusioned with Ultimate for a while because of the incredibly poor online experience + the Covid-19 pandemic + Nintendo shutting down events, and NASB promised a fresh "Smash-like" ("Melee-like"?) experience that had good online, incredible potential for internet humor and the famous mechanic that Super Smash Bros has neglected for the past 3 games.

And I think NASB, as a product, really delivered. The game is exactly what they made it out to be. But mechanically it has no soul, the philosophy behind the design is flawed, and it ends up feeling like every other "smash clone" that has ever existed like Digimon Rumble Arena or Cartoon Network Punch Time Explosion. The big difference being that now, most smash players know about the competitive scene.

The game is too technical for its own good. Mastering movement in NASB is very very important, and ergonomically awful, high level matches are just 2 characters flying around and doing a lot of "sick movement" while throwing out random hitboxes, until one of them gets hit and dies (or not) and then repeat until the match is over.

And why would you want that many movement options in the first place? Aerials have no endlag, short hopping and spamming aerials is a super strong strategy with very low risk, and some characters have moves so big that you can approach and anti air at the same time.
It's a super unnappealing gameplan for me, and the lack of defensive options make it even worse.

I criticize Rivals Of Aether for some of that as well, but every character has a specific mechanic/gameplan that makes them unique, they have to work towards a specific objective in the match, and taking all the matchups into consideration makes RoA a very rich game that stands out, where characters have their own way to deal with each other, and where movement really matters, even though it not being my cup of tea.

In NASB every character has crazy ground and air movement by design, similar recoveries, very similar or identical kill confirms and combos, they all look for the same things in neutral, so the line between characters is blurred.

Balance is really silly too, but that's expected in a game like this. And I really couldn't care less about patches, they won't fix what really is wrong about the game (most people are complaining about the game not being polished, lack of voice acting, and even about the price, and I think they are completely missing the important stuff).

And I'm sure Nickelodeon pressured the devs a lot to release the game asap, so that sucks too.

In the end NASB is another game that tries to be Smash (with a twist) but doesn't get it. I don't want every platform fighter to be the same, and this is a nice little experiment, but there's so much more to the genre than wavedashing and getting 0 to deaths.

Kusoge material for sure. Feels like Smash 64 with UMVC3 movement and that just doesn't make any sense.