I don't know if it's the standard for games featuring loot boxes or if I've just been incredibly lucky at avoiding this exact situation, but getting hit with a loot box before even starting the tutorial has to be some kind of record.

Hot Wheels Unleashed is a cool game in-concept, with highly-detailed (not on the Switch lmao) car models accurately reflecting the actual Hot Wheels model cars, furiously racing down a toy track complete with loop-de-loops, boosts, and off-track sections showcasing that the courses take place inside of a home. These are toys, after all.

In practice, I'm honestly too blinded by anger from the immediate loot boxes and all of the cool cars being DLC that I'm just gonna end the review highly discouraging spending money on anything ever. The one-two-punch of seeing the Mystery Machine as a playable car, and then seeing "Paid DLC" next to it isn't one I'm gonna forget.

Thankfully, I am a drunken sailor.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater walked so that OlliOlli World could run so that Grimace's Birthday could remind you to get your daily recommended over-allowance of sugars, fats, and artificial sweeteners, and then shit all over itself.

The demon of Babylon disguises himself with the coat of the righteous.

God bless America.

I bought Defunct for the Nintendo Switch shortly after purchasing the system. This is because for the first year or so of the Switch being out the Nintendo eShop sometimes had games go on-sale for 10 cents. Sometimes 1 cent. I didn't have a gaming computer yet, so I wasn't yet used to the overwhelming library of free games readily available to me via Steam, scouring the internet, or good ol' straight-up piracy emulation. Seeing a game sell for a penny blew my mind, and it was hard to pass up, so I snagged a good handful of penny-candy shovelware. Some of it is actually good.

I bring up Defunct specifically because it plays exactly like Zineth does, with its gravity-increasing speed-boosting terrain traversal across a wide, hilly space. As a playground, it feels good to move in, but there's not much going on in terms of making it interesting.

Meanwhile, Zineth is out here putting mini-games on the right side of the screen for you to play while you're riding walls and zooming around a desert.

It's bright, colorful, and feels excellent to play. The wall-riding part is a little jank, but it more than makes up for it with its sense of style.

Don't play Defunct, it sucks. Play Zineth instead. It's cool.

Dying in Space Harrier really is one of the funniest things to happen in a video game.

You got this jacked sunglasses-wearing dude with a laser-cannon, running full-speed-ahead, no looking back. Waves upon waves of aliens, robots, and geometry, all appearing and slinging blinking bullets faster than you can react to. And then suddenly, faster than your brain can even register, it happens...

All momentum stops completely.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGH.

Get ready!"

...and you're instantly back to full speed, like nothing happened.

Goofy gaming.

Looks incredible for 1985, but still goofy gaming.

what is the fucking point of a QC team if your game is going to end up being like this with a $60 price tag knowing damn well that people are going to play it for hours on end anyway because it's a Pokémon game?

I felt like I was taking crazy pills the whole time I was playing this. The new Pokémon are great (Clodsire is an instant favorite), the character designs are fun, the story is interesting (like 3/4 into the game for fuck's sake), the post-game is actually good for the first time in a while. It's standard Pokémon fare. But this game wastes so much of your goddamned time. Granted, this has always been a problem I've had with Pokémon games, with Diamond and Pearl being particularly aggressive about it (they fixed it with Platinum and HGSS). Violet does it in a way that bothers me much more however, in that this is a current day current year AAA title that should not be suffering from the shortcomings it suffers from where are your fucking standards

Maybe I just don't have the right perspective about open-world games, given that I haven't played too many of them, but I was under the impression that movement and exploration were supposed to be the cornerstones of any “good” open-world game.

Regarding movement, Cars for the Gamecube had better movement-feel, and a massive problem I have with that game is that the movement is stiff and clunky. Like an actual car driving over desert terrain. Instead of a cartoon car driving over anywhere. Meanwhile, Violet gives you a futurist motorcycle-dragon and it just has absolutely no weight to it whatsoever. Given that’s a “futuristic” motorcycle, I imagine that this is somewhat intended, but I’m under the impression that the unga bunga horse-dragon in Scarlet feels the exact same way. This gets tricky because traversing a huge open-world land should be easy, which it is, but I personally hate that there’s very little weight to the basic movement feel of the game. I don’t want it to be Death Stranding, I just want it to feel good to move around in this move-around-based game.

The exploration part gets tricky too, because I don’t actually hate the exploration aspect to this game completely. I mostly just hate when video games deliberately lie to my face.

Right out the gate, you’re told to go to school. You get your Pokémon buddy and you’re on your way. After getting introduced to the school and forced into a brief unskippable cutscene, you’re free to have your adventure. “Go wherever you want.”

Okay, well that was a fucking lie.

It gives you a suggestion of “east for the gym challenge, west for the other stuff, whichever direction should be fine,” and then it level-gates you. If you looked at the map and said “woah, psychic-type gym all the way over there, neat! I’m gonna go there first!”, you fucking can’t because the Pokémon in the cave blocking it are thirty levels higher than you. “Okay cool, I’ll go the other way and try challenging the normal-type gym with the guy who’s portrait isn’t even showing his face, that looks interesting.” Same deal. You gotta go do the other stuff first.

I don’t think sections of areas in games with the message of “come back once you get stronger” are inherently bad, but being blocked off from exploration in a game that tells you to explore freely with the solution of “grind more” is shit.

Plus, when you do inevitably end up completing all of the other stuff you’re not nearly as interested in, there’s the strong possibility of running into a challenge you’re way overleveled for and beating it without so much as batting an eye.

And that’s completely ignoring the constant graphical issues happening while you’re traversing the world. It’s been addressed. I don't have anything new to add on that front.

Great, so it’s got bad pacing, bad graphical issues, and mediocre traversal.

Legends: Arceus is better and it sucked in the same way.

The turn-based RPG part of Violet didn’t exactly blow me away either, but I think that has less to do with the combat quality and more to do with me being generally bored with the pacing of Pokémon battles after having played all of the mainline games up to this one. The core of Pokémon battles is still a great time, it’s complex rock-paper-scissors games where Ice type always loses (lmao) featuring an element of chance and layers of status elements. I did find a genuine challenge in the later battles and elite four, which I cannot say of the past few Pokémon generations. Most of the single-player game’s battles aren’t the most engaging (in most Pokémon games across the board), and this isn’t necessarily a problem, but outside of a few exceptions I was bored through most of it.

Even Legends: Arceus had a much quicker pacing of battles that kept me paying attention to most of it. The option to send out your Pokémon on the overworld to quickly defeat wild Pokémon is a tremendous blessing, as it makes grinding much less of a chore. That said, I wish they incorporated the aspect of being able to catch Pokémon in real-time like in Legends: Arceus, as catching Pokémon turn-based RPG style by whittling down their health to minimum, blasting them with status afflictions, throwing a Pokéball and holding B+down while praying for good luck has never been my favorite part of the game for me. Thank Arceus for Quick Balls.

I’m probably overall just asking too much for a Nintendo Switch game, but creature-collector god-killer Shin Megami Tensei V didn’t have these problems nearly as badly, and it looks leagues better. Granted it wasn’t a true “open world” game, and suffers from the issue of your level effectively gating your progress, but it did it in a way that was so smooth that you never feel level-gated. Most importantly, unlike a certain most profitable video game series ever, I actually had fun for most of the time playing it. To be fair, this is a rough comparison because Pokémon outnumbers SMT by several times over in sheer number of monsters and abilities you get access to. That said, this ties naturally into the biggest complaint I have about Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. More important to me than everything else I’ve listed:

where the fuck is Snorlax

I know having every attack animation have detail, having a detailed world that is actually fun to explore, and having an engaging and balanced difficulty throughout the entire game is huge ask for a company attempting to appeal to the largest possible demographic, but life is short and I’m fucking bored.

This is so frustrating because I didn’t want to hate this game. But it’s impossible for me not to compare it to other games I’ve already played that do everything that this one does but better. I know that the Pokémon Company can do better, but they continue to not, all in order to get their latest game pushed out in time for the season. It sucks. It sucks that it sucks. The whole thing sucks. I hate that I hate it.

Maybe none of this matters and I'm just getting old.

An astute criticism of capitalism and "wholesome/cozy" games presented in the most obnoxious way I can imagine.

The looping midi piano music and seasickness-inducing waving font throughout this glorified twitter soapbox truly was the dogshit-flavored icing needed for this horseshit-flavored cake.

My favorite part was when the game crashed.

"Think of your many years of procrastination, and how you've always been granted more and more time of which you never took advantage.

It's time to realize the nature of the world to which you belong - to understand that you have a time limit and it's running out.

So use it to advance your enlightenment or it will be gone forever!"

-clump of grass