wafflesforleah
2014
My Vita has been the only thing I've played video games on for a huge chunk of the middle of this year and the games I've been playing have been this wonderful little guy and a baseball game!
I only have kudos to give here, and simple ones at that! It's great! It's Puyo and Tetris! It's got cute interstitial screens--what's not to love
2023
This review contains spoilers
Final Fantasy 13 (and Lightning Returns) is my favorite of the mainline Final Fantasy games, and when I started playing this one, I knew almost right away that I was going to find a lot to love.
Now that I've finished it, I can say that FF 16 is for brothers what FF 13 is for sisters. Joshua and Clive form the emotional core of the narrative just as Lightning and Serah do with 13. More than that though, both games are primarily about family--blood family, yes, but primarily found family.
The world our characters inhabit in this game is a profoundly sad one--much like our own. It's a world beset by systemic bigotry, geopolitical strife and climate change, and one where you could forgive people for not finding much to live for.
And it's that very thing--finding something to live for--that we guide Clive and his family towards. And Clive guides his allies and the whole realm towards that same thing in kind.
This is a beautiful game full of despair, hope, love and a search for meaning. In the end, despite all of the pre-release comparisons to Game Of Thrones, FF 16 is never cynical; bonds are never tested, Clive is never found wanting. Instead, this game does something much more brave: it demonstrates to us that love and hope can and do win. The sun can--and literally does--rise the next morning on a new and better world.
I should mention the gameplay stuff I reckon too! This game has the best difficulty feature I have ever played for an action game: the ability to equip some built-in accessories that cause Clive to automatically dodge attacks as well as for the player to only have to repeatedly press the attack button to put together incredible combos! I absolutely love that part--it's what made the game playable for me. I was unable to progress past the very first boss in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake because of my inability to play action games like that--but because of the accessibility option here I was able to play, and love, this game.
Apart from that, I quite simply loved all of the gameplay elements. The hunts were fun, the side quests were lovely--it was all wonderful.
This game is as good as a modern game can get! You should play it, I think!
Like with any years' sports game titles, I'm not really "finished" with NFS Unbound and will keep playing it whenever I feel like racing, but I've played enough of it now to throw it in the ol' Backloggd.
I absolutely love it! Like with any yearly iteration of a sports game, I knew I would like this going into it; it's racing, it's got dress-up dolls, I like the general vibe of it.
I don't have incredibly complicated thoughts except for that it's fun to dress up your character and car(s) and drive around and race and just have a blast. What more can someone ask for from a racing game? Any racing game that has a customizable dress-up doll racer is gonna be leagues ahead of the others in my book.
I love this game!
I’ve been playing this as my “I have 5-10 minutes to play a bit” game for the last couple months since I first got and CFW’d a Vita and it’s skyrocketed to maybe my favorite video game for that purpose ever.
Firstly this game looks ridiculously good for a portable game from this era. Unlike its Power Pros cousins, the Pro Yakut Spirits games are “real” players instead of the chibis and it looks great. There’s replays and even press interviews after games and really nice rain effects.
The manager mode is wonderful—player growth, scouting, draft boards and everything you would expect.
All in all, I just couldn’t possibly ask for more from a portable pick-up-put-down sports game like this.
This wasn't for me; it wasn't to my taste, unfortunately. I got out of the tutorial to the mode select and put it down.
I liked a lot about it: controlling a person made the visual novel stuff "feel" better for me than a visual novel ever had before, like i had a bit more control and agency and such.
The combat was pretty neato but probably for my taste it would've gripped me more if it was less abstracted or if i could zoom in and see the mecha punching the dudes--I did like that missile spam though that looked great!
I'm not the world's biggest fan of the big boobs and the naked girls in the mecha and whatnot; it's hard for me to get past stuff like that.
1994
I've written a lot about how important Lunar: Silver Star is to me--specifically the Mega CD one--and Eternal Blue has always loomed in the background. I was aware of it as a kid, I was aware that a sequel to one of my favorite games like, existed, but it seemed...too much. It seemed to my child brain that it would be too hard to re-open that book; my emotions were locked into the first game, so why play a sequel?
As I got older, it became a bit of trivia I suppose--especially after I got rid of all of my childhood video game stuff and drifted from the hobby.
And then I came back and finally decided to play it, and it's wonderful. It's Lunar! It looks lovely in the same way Silver Star does. I love the cast of characters and the art style and the animations.
The story gets a bit more ambitious here--it's longer, too by a bit.
For me, it doesn't quite match Silver Star not just because of my emotional love of the first one, but also because Eternal Blue goes a liiiiiiittle wide. Not enough for me to dislike it at all, but it's noticeable.
If you like Silver Star you owe it to yourself to play Eternal Blue, for sure!
Played the story mode of this one as my friends watched on and we had a blast--the art is great and it looks great too. The racing feels a liiiiitle loosy-goosey but on the whole it was fun!
1996
What's not to love? It's Bomberman! We played 6 players with the Bomberman face multitap and it was wonderful and fun!
It's Bomberman!
2023
II love Mecha and I love tactical games, so I thought this would be very up my alley. But gosh, I really just don't like the timeline thing.
I know the game is very new and is like, early access still or whatever that means but they would have to fundamentally change the combat mechanics for me to be interested. Ah well!
Ah Phantasy Star 4.
I decided to replay this on a whim after some friends decided against it as a game club pick, and with cheats and such I was done in about 6 hours or so.
It's just such a wonderful experience. Planet hopping, offing the big bad guy(s), funny dialogue, gorgeous looking graphics. I just adore it.
I don't have incredibly deep thoughts, but I just like it a lot.
Gachapon Senshi 2 is everything wonderful about Scramble Wars but elevated just a bit! Gone is the 3 actions per turn limit in favor of 12 actions per turn. There's also automated battling now (the pre-battle screen has a nauseatingly obnoxious siren before you hit start)!
There's also more maps, more mobile suits and more more more!
Now
We're
Talkin
We're
Talkin
As I write this, I'm in the midst of writing an article about the history of SD Gundam tactical games, and this right here is the origin. This one!
I'd never played anything on the Famicom Disk System, and I found it fascinating. It was like a suped-up NES, and it was really rad.
This game is, well, it's what it says on the tin: it's the progenitor of what was to come, and it shows in every single way. The core DNA of the series is here right from the start: moving icons around on a grid, engaging in real-time battles, unit production and seizing cities to make more money.
What I find fascinating is the grid here isn't hexes; it's squares. You get all of the downsides that come with squares instead of hexes for movement on a grid, which I find really interesting--what it means is you can easily minimize the angles opponents can take to get to you because moving diagonally "costs" extra, whereas with hexes, it's all the same.
The art is adorable as usual, and the sprites are wonderful.
This is a little treasure of a game, and I would absolutely adore playing against a real human.
I wish I could elucidate in fancier words what I didn't like about this...
- I didn't love how it looked
- I didn't love any of the story bits that I got to see
- I didn't love the combat system
- I didn't love any of the story bits that I got to see
- I didn't love the combat system
Just absolutely not a game for me, sadly.
I love how that Wonderswan one looks though!
I made a commitment to myself when I started this Backlogg'd that I would only log games that I played since starting the Backlogg'd, even if only for a little. Well, I noticed I had this beloved game o' mine on Steam this morning and fired it up and fired my brain back to middle school. Goodness gracious how much I loved this game.
I played so much of 2 when I was even younger (and calling the Rogue units "roo-zuh" (like the makeup) and my eyes popped out of my sockets when I got 3.
It's more or less everything I ever want from a video game. It feels like a comfy blanket, it feels like home, it feels like peanut M&Ms. The GOAT, plain and simple.
2022
I got suuuper duper sucked into this today and ended up playing through, a bit accelerated at the end (after I reached the painting-the-map-cleanup part).
I really, really like this! I have a huge soft spot for Dune and I'm a big 4x head so there's lots for me to love here. The units and buildings look neat, and I like the way you expand your area.
I think where this game falls short is the lack of the game to really grip you diplomatically on single-player. With one or maybe two other human players this would really, really whip.