GT7 is frustrating and fun in equal measure. For every exhilarating race, there's a questionable design decision sitting somewhere waiting to pounce on you.

Cars feel great to drive, but some classic tracks have been changed a bit too much, losing their unique identities in the process. You're given interesting and challenging missions to complete, but also have to deal with a neutered campaign that sees you play a cafe customer being talked to by cardboard cutouts more than a driver.

As a return to the classic GT single player CaRPG then, it's quite disappointing. But then you get into Sport mode and everything changes - nothing quite beats the thrill of driving against real people and the races really do feel exciting even if you're only fighting over 13th place. Annoyances still exist - even here you're stuck with too many rolling starts, and the handing out of penalties is inconsistent at best - but it's easily the game's biggest strength.

The economy, microstransactions and economy are a whole other story which I won't get into properly as it doesn't really affect me too much as getting every car isn't what I care about that much in these games - but suffice to say that I still think they've become way too stingy with payouts and cynically so, it's all to railroad you to Spend More Money.

But I keep coming back. 70 hours and counting, dipping into new Sport races as they pop up and honing my skills. Will I keep at it? Possibly not, but it's a very easy game to dip into once you've got through the main single player side of things and honestly, these cars feel great to drive.

I don't think I've mentally flitted around so much in my opinion of a game over 100 hours of playtime but after everything from hatred and exasperation to respect and admiration I've ended up feeling pretty positive indeed on my experience.

It's a hard game, and one I didn't think I'd particularly enjoy especially having bounced off Demon's Souls and Bloodborne quite heavily, but maybe it was the fact that I actually spent money on this (rather than getting it as a 'freebie' through PS Plus) but I persevered and had myself a good time. The feeling of satisfaction when you finally beat a boss is honestly hard to match, and the critical path 'dungeons' are easily the best part of the game - it makes me think that I need to give these previous games (and the Dark Souls series in general) another shake.

Did the open world help here? Maybe - I'm not sure it necessarily added that much to what was on offer other than having somewhere else to go if you got stuck, and I also don't think it's a particularly well designed one, but there were enough interesting places to discover that I went off the beaten track more times that I expected to. As for the story and lore of the world though, I was left underwhelmed - it was fine, but I knew I wasn't getting invested in the hows and whys of the main 'story' or the sidequests.

At the end of the day though, I was surprised. Surprised that I'd had such a good time after dying a lot and having to deal with a lot of minor frustrations caused by seemingly purposefully obtuse design decisions. Despite going through phases of loving and hating the game in equal measure at various points, when it works, Elden Ring is a great experience.

Changing Tides expands on Lone Sails in almost every way - it's longer, there are more elements of your vehicle to control and it utilises the Y axis a lot more thanks to the addition of both your wanderer and vehicle being able to dive.

In ways it makes the journey feel more epic than before - you traverse more ground, fight larger storms while also dealing with being thrown around by rough waters. The puzzles you deal with feel more involved than in Lone Sails, and as such feel more satisfying to pass through.

In others it accentuates the negatives. Some of the longer traversal sections between locations go on for too long, and the eerie serenity of the first game is diluted a little as you need to multitask more often which has the knock on effect of physical hazards almost appearing out of nowhere with little chance to avoid collision. Thankfully the punishment for this isn't too extreme, perhaps more lenient this time round but it can disrupt your flow a touch.

But at the end of the day, it's more FAR. If you liked the firs one, I'm almost certain you'll enjoy this. It's the truest of video game sequels really - take the first game and do it again, but bigger. Is Changing Tides better than its predecessor? Not quite but it's definitely more and that's not a terrible thing.

A positive step for the Pokemon franchise, one which we'll likely see elements of in Gen 9 but hopefully these ideas and mechanics which will be expanded upon in a full sequel in this style.

I'd like to see some of the Dex research points less generic and more specific to each species, and while the act of catching was surprisingly satisfying (even for the 25th or 26th time on a specific monster) there needs to be another elements added to make the process a bit more involved. By the end of the game I had so many bait or distraction items just sitting unused in my inventory as I waited for each Pokemon to turn around and then throw an Ultra Ball, resulting in an almost guaranteed catch.

There's been a lot of handwringing about the graphics and how they resemble a PS2 game and look, I get that they're not great - especially with the budget that Gamefreak likely have - but I do wonder if people remember what PS2 games looked like. There's obviously work to be done here and more time likely needed to be given to the developers to allow for less hitches and more polish. Thankfully the core of the game works well enough that I was able to quite easily gloss over the pop-in and lack of detail (well, mostly. Some sections, especially those that involved water or dark cave areas were quite distracting).

It's not a perfect game but I had a great time with it, exploring each area was fun and the side missions added a bit of life to your home village and it was nice to see it build up as time went on.

A few stray thoughts:
- To increase a Pokemon's stats outside of leveling up, you're essentially force feeding them rocks and gravel which is a bizarre image. Might be great for a Geodude, but surely less fun for a Chimchar or Eevee
- The overall message of the game seems to be that 'colonialism is good, actually' leaves a bit of a bitter taste, especially with the Galaxy Corp acting as saviours to the two indigenous tribes on a few occasions. Though fair play on making the colonisers from Galar (read: British) because yeah, we are absolutely the worst.
- The game certainly knows the audience it's going for where the main characters first concern at being ripped from their own time into a murky netherealm is seemingly 'oh god, my phone, MY PHONE!'
- 'Set' battle style is great and I think that's going to be an option I change in any Pokemon game I play going forward. Agile/Strong is a nice idea, but it's let down by the turn order info screen disappearing and not giving you information for when an opponent gets two turns in a row and can feel random at times.

Nobody Saves the World can feel very grindy, so much so that there were points where it felt more like busywork than an enjoyable dungeon crawling ARPG. Sometimes you're rewarded way too quickly and have pings for more XP to claim way too often, other times the combat challenged felt overly complex leading to numerous repeat encounters to meet the requirements.

But once you get past a certain threshold for each class, everything instantly becomes more freeing, and you can deftly switch from being a fire breathing bodybuilder who throws his literal weights around to a superfast slug with the ability to summon bunnies and tigers (stolen from the magician class) that's main attack is crying at its enemies. I'm not sure the semi-procedural dungeons works entirely (I think curated design could have worked just as well, if not better) but I appreciated that each dungeon had a modifier or limit on one mechanic which encouraged playing around with different skills and loadouts.

Creating your own unique build among the varied roster of classes and setting them loose in each dungeon that makes this game worth the effort and I'm glad I was able to overcome that initial hurdle to get to this point as I (eventually) had a ton of fun with it.

11 years down the line and this game still looks absolutely stunning. The level design really comes to life once you learn that speed is the way this game is meant to be played, and the specific chase-focused levels here (Tricky Treasure) seem better thought out than the still fantastic music levels in Legends. That's not even getting into the soundtrack which is energetic and atmospheric in exactly the right places.

I couldn't tell you if I preferred this or Legends, but I was mostly impressed how well Origins manages to hold its own and still feel unique, even with 40 of its levels in the sequel. They should both be in the conversation when it comes to discussions about the best of the best platform games.

Took me a while to get round to playing the game that stood out the most during the PS5 reveal conference but happy to say it was worth the wait.

The Snax are the highlight here - there are some inspired design decisions and even with the overall number being padded out by colour variations, relatively few of them felt cheaply done. It's genuinely amazing how much work a pair of googly eyes can do to make them look so appealing and fun. There are also very few words in the history of video games as fun to say as Scoopy Banoopy.

The cast of Grumpuses also stood out, along with their own specific anxieties and eccentricities. Each character has a set of side-missions which are okay (more on that in a second), but the reward of learning more about them, their personalities and relationships made what could be quite tedious at times worth the effort.

I do wish the act of actually interacting with and catching Bugsnax was a bit more interesting though. It starts off fine, with some simple puzzles to solve as to how to get them into the right position but it never really progresses much further than that. Once you receive a certain trap, most other become obsolete and you're barely challenged in how to catch any new creature you come across, barring a handful of exceptions - hopefully this is something that's tackled in the upcoming DLC.

But as I sit here and contemplate my playthrough, those frustrations barely register - the game became a meme during that initial reveal but it's anything but, with tender stories and explorations of interpersonal relationships hidden underneath those admittedly goofy looking googly eyes. Definitely worth a playthrough.