This is it. This is the one.

Pokemon romhacks are omnipresent. There are at least 150 on Backloggd and over 1000 on PokeHarbor. Most often, fangames attempt huge changes to their base games, sometimes creating an entirely new adventure, but the three versions of Shin Pokemon are much more restrained, focusing instead on surgical alterations to Gen I that largely maintain the original experience as opposed to supplanting it.

This has been attempted before, most notably with Pokemon Red++, but even that sought to modernize Gen I. There's obviously nothing wrong with that, but Shin Pokemon isn't interested in adding abilities, held items, or new evolutions. Rather, it's all about making the definitive Gen I experience.

The full list of changes can be found here, so I'm just going to go over the major selling points. A toggleable Hard Mode means the trainers actually make intelligent decisions now. Unless you overlevel, you can't just spam attacks and expect to win. Speaking of overlevelling, there are fantastic options that allow customization of your game, including auto-trainer level scaling, trainer team randomization (which does not affect key battles such as gym leaders), and wild encounter randomization. What's key about this is that it's not your standard randomizer, you're not going to run into a Mew on Route 2. Instead, Pokemon are swapped with a comparable counterpart with similar stats and evolution status. For example, between Pallet Town and Viridian City, the Pidgeys and Rattatas in my game were replaced with Vulpixes and Mankeys. The randomization is consistent, tied to your save file so it's not constantly shuffling. This kind of replacement creates an engaging remix of Gen I while still feeling more like an official release than a wacky hack. Now this does mean that sometimes you'll fish up a Charmander with a Super Rod, but all in all I thought it was very well-implemented.

The Select button gets a lot more to do here, showing an extra options menu (where you can turn Hard mode, better trainer AI, obedience level caps, and Nuzlocke mode on and off), swapping between a second inventory (THIS IS HUGE!!), auto-selecting HM moves, and, when combined with another button like a hotkey), using your bike or rod without requiring any menu navigation. You can also hold B to run, doubling your speed, but this also works while surfing AND while biking! This is arguably my favorite improvement, as it's become second nature to increase the speed of Pokemon games ever since the Dodrio Mode in Pokemon Stadium's Game Boy Tower. What I always disliked about that, however, was mangling the god-tier OST. With the ability to run and to bike at 2x speed, I felt no need to rush any more than that. This is the ideal speed for Gen I, they absolutely nailed it.

Moves get a little bit of a makeover here, but nothing crazy. The most critical change here is that outside of a Pokemon's 4 move slots, a fifth "Field Move" slot has been created, allowing a Pokemon to learn a single HM for overworld use only. I LOVE not having to sacrifice an attack slot for Cut, this is an incredible inclusion. Beyond that, moves in-battle are more repaired than revised. Focus Energy and Rage actually do what they're supposed to, multi-turn attacks like Wrap and Fire Spin telegraph the final turn and allow switching out in order to avoid infinite trapping, though the game also allows running from a trainer battle (counts as blacking out) if you legitimately get stuck.

There are a couple of new features added, but they're tastefully done and don't drastically affect the original experience. If you're interested, I'd highly recommend reading through the full breakdown of alterations and giving the game a shot. This is the most I've enjoyed Gen I since the Game Boy days, and it deserves all the attention and praise it can get.

Incredibly brief, yet padded with plenty of frustration. I've been helping my kids with a handful of licensed games recently, and Bluey's debut title unfortunately has more jank than Peppa Pig, PJ Masks, and Miraculous Ladybug all put together.

From a certain point of view, I respect the inclusion of 3D platforming elements that require precise jumps (hopping from rock to rock at the creek, or jumping towards the camera on the shelves in Bluey's room), but when my 3-year-old keeps passing me the controller because the game won't allow him to progress until he presses Y in a tiny pixel-perfect location, I start to wonder how much testing went into this.

The animations, VO, and setting obviously carry the experience, underneath what was licensed lies a bland and broken platformer containing 4 levels to replay and 5 hub world areas to explore. We had a much better time hunting for collectibles in the post-game (if you can even call it that) than we did in any scripted segments, but even then, some items seem to resist your attempts to collect them if you're the tiniest bit too close or too far.

The biggest issue we had is that the camera simply does not know what to do during co-op. The issue of how to handle distance between players is not unique to Bluey: The Videogame, but it's handled exceptionally poorly. In something like Gauntlet Legends, you can all run in different directions until the camera reaches a maximum zoom-out, leaving players to determine together which direction they'll travel in. In many Lego games, the screen will dynamically split, allowing two players to travel apart, then un-split the screen when they return together. But in Bluey, the camera picks one player seemingly at random to prioritize. It's not always P1, and it's not always whoever's closest to the middle of the screen, but the chosen player is granted agency, while any remaining players get auto-returned like a drone that's lost connection to the remote control. This becomes a huge problem when any obstacle lies between the returning character and the other player, as you cannot alter your course until you're within arm's length of your teammate. It's busted!

It's also got that frustrating audio thing that licensed games always seem to do, where the volume levels are all over the place, and when multiple characters speak at the same time, there's no reduction in gain, so the volume suddenly quadruples when the family shouts "Yeah!" together. WHY IS THIS SUCH A CONSISTENT ISSUE

A rhythm game specifically for musicians who play by ear, expecting you to hear a rhythm and/or melody and immediately repeat it back

It's very clearly a Fall Guys ripoff (the menus may as well be copy/pasted) with a little more WarioWare in the games, but I had a lovely time finally using my music degree for something 🎵🎶

Got 3rd overall the first time, then 2nd five matches in a row before finally winning.

I am VERY CONFLICTED about Rift Apart. It's an absolutely stunning showcase for the PS5 in every way, and it feels like a legitimate masterpiece most of the time. But then it just has to do something dumb every once in a while to bring the experience down.

First: The Good!

I've said it in multiple reviews before, but I really am in love with the DualSense. The haptic triggers, advanced rumble, and speaker (when used correctly) create a thoroughly engrossing experience that I will never not be a sucker for. The way that you half-pull a trigger for certain functions feels amazing, especially with the gentle little stop in the middle. The sounds and voices that come out of the controller throughout are just fun, and the rumble does a great job of making each weapon you use and each surface you walk on feel different. I love it!

Beyond the controller, the weapons feel great to use in and of themselves. I leveled each weapon up fully and spent all the Raritanium you can acquire in a single playthrough. In the end, there were very few weapons I didn't adore. I was a particularly big fan of the Negatron Collider. Big laser good.

I played this game right after finally getting a 4K OLED TV, and it's easily the most visually impressive game I've played to date. It's easy to take incredible graphics for granted, but I try to stop and say "wow" every once in a while, and Rift Apart probably got more wows out of me than anything I've played since Uncharted 4. And can you believe how good all that FUR looks?!?

Anyhow, missions are fun, characters are enjoyable, weapons great, visuals stunning, music solid, blah blah blah. Why didn't this end up clearing a 4/5 for me even though I was absolutely enamored with it most of the time?

The Bad!!

The Clank astral projection mini game is... fine. Just felt like puzzles for puzzles' sake, there was nothing particularly compelling there, I'm not sure if it's filler or a misguided attempt to break up the near-flawless Ratchet/Rivet gameplay, but I think the game as a whole would be better off without it.

The Glitch mini game is worse. A tiny cute spider robot shoots viruses? Okay that's kind of cool I guess, but... it's in a game that already has a lot of fantastic shooting. Why are we interrupting that for some bland laser-zapping? They try to give Glitch her own antagonist here, but it just ends up feeling pointless and hollow. Playing the Glitch levels felt like watching a bunch of 4-minute webisodes that spun off from your favorite TV show. The showrunners swear that these matter and are worth your time, but... are they??

Those are both downers, but they don't ruin the main third-person shooting and platforming. You might even argue that they make you appreciate the main gameplay even more by giving you something bland and tedious to compare it to! But, unfortunately, even the Ratchet/Rivet stuff ends up stumbling once you try to go for 100%. (And let's be real, if I'm enjoying a 3D platformer collectathon, I'm gonna collect every single thing) In the first Ratchet & Clank, levels are wide open areas which give you a variety of options for potential paths between any two points. Rift Apart mostly eschews this approach (with Savali being the main exception), instead focusing on segmented levels built around scripted set pieces. These make for some great and exciting scenes, but once you're trying to navigate a world like Sargasso or Cordelion without just following objective markers, you realize there's often one railroaded path that connects islands or rooms together, with deviation not often being possible. In a more open setting, exploration is a joy and wouldn't invoke the term "backtracking" at all, but completing most areas of Rift Apart feels a bit too much like repeating levels of an on-rails shooter, hoping you don't accidentally miss something because you'll have to begin the sequence of island-hopping again.

It really is a great game, and I'm glad I played it. But man, it's such a shame that it's not as consistent as it could've been.