If Metroid Prime 2 wanted to be a harder, more story-driven game than its predecessor, while maintaining an identity of its own, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption's goal is a lot clearer. It wants to be a big, bombastic finale to the Prime series, and it probably also wants to be Halo. This is pretty clear since moment one- where every other Prime game and most games in the franchise at the time had little on-screen story and dialogue, Corruption starts with a long tutorial delivered by friendly NPCs, and then follows that up with an action intro where you meet three fellow Bounty Hunters you'll be working with. It takes little time for things to go wrong, and while the four of you manage to avoid disaster, you are all knocked out for a month by the villain of the previous game, Dark Samus. When you wake up, you find out your suit has been modified to house Phazon, the all-consuming evil matter that the trilogy revolves around, and with Samus tasked to save two different planets from destruction at the hands of Phazon, the game finally starts proper.

Except, does it really? As I said, Corruption's goals are pretty different from the other games: it's clearly trying to be a more linear and narratively focused game first, and a metroidvania second. Action with a side of exploration, not exploration with a side of action, while still keeping the Metroid spirit. This is... fine, frankly. Fusion does something similar, and I quite it like that game. And Corruption's combat is... alright! It's the same basis as the rest of the series, with the removal of beams to switch between (not such a bad thing, in my personal opinion, but the loss of hidden weapons kinda sucks, especially in a game that has you do more shooting) and the addition of Hyper Mode, which a lot of the combat relies around- you sacrifice 99 hp, and get to briefly do a whole lot more damage. Even with what I'm about to say, this is definitely the Metroid Prime game I had the most fun fighting in, though mostly because of the bosses. The problem with the core combat is that Hyper Mode quickly stops being an emergency tool that you only use when needed, and eventually becomes the only thing you'll ever be doing. One health container quickly becomes a lot less of your overall HP pool, and when enemies get spongy enough to do more damage than that in half a second, you'll be popping it on every fight, multiple times. It's just too strong of a tool- you can hammer down on a Space Pirate for 20 seconds before taking them out, all the while their friends pelt you with bullets, or you can go Hyper Mode and wipe the entire squad in half that time. Luckily bosses need to be made vulnerable before you can deal damage to them, so that isn't a problem there. In fact, I must once again commend the overall design of some of these fights- they've got the puzzle element you'd expect from the series, requiring you to figure out the right combination of actions to make the boss vulnerable, but they don't let up on a mechanical level either, asking you to execute your strategy efficiently and quickly, all the while demanding some good aiming and dodging. Great stuff.

Something worth noting is that I played on Hard and at the beginning, I thought this game was going to be a real challenge- several fights in the end of the first area got me to struggle quite a lot, which I welcomed, but the difficulty loosened up pretty quickly, with the exception of the occasional boss encounter. Something else to note is I played this game on Dolphin, using PC FPS controls. It was a great experience, but it does prevent me from commenting on the game's use of motion controls, which are a very important element of it. Perhaps I'd have enjoyed combat more if I had to physically yank enemies' items and weapons away, rather than just pressing a button to do so. A thing that I can comment on, though, is Samus' Gunship, which is very weird- a whole Visor slot is sacrificed to being able to command it, and the first upgrade it gets is the ability to bomb enemies. This is really cool in theory, but completely pointless in practice. Even among the wide open areas where you'd expect this ability to be usable (which given this is still a Metroid game, are few and far between), the ship can only be used in a few of them, to the point that I don't think I actually ever remembered to use it on an enemy once. There's even ammo expansions for the missiles as pickups but I couldn't fathom ever using them often enough for those to matter. Feels like they had the idea but then never figured out how to implement it.

Where I think Corruption really falters, though, is the level design. Again, it's not a problem to make a game less open, but this is taking the worst of both worlds. First off, progression is not only 100% linear, but spelled out to you by some NPC over comms- there's an option to turn off hints, but bafflingly that only removes the marker over the area they tell you to go to, not the actual dialogue and cutscene that points you to that area. In Prime 1/2 you could choose to go in entirely unassisted, here you'll be babied no matter what. But that might be for the best, because frankly backtracking in this game sucks. A game like Super Metroid handles its world by having side rooms spin off a central, shorter path- you may want to explore every branch of this tall room in Brinstar once you first reach it, but when you're done with that you can just go through the center room any time you pass by. It's smart- it focuses a lot of content in side areas so backtracking is quicker. Corruption does the exact opposite to an infuriating degree. I mean look at this shit, it's literally a straight line from the beginning to the end, and you'll have to go through that a few times, especially if you backtrack for collectibles. Even just on the first time through, you'll need to go back through these levels on your way out, a lot of the time. And those collectibles are worthless, a lot of the time. Ship Ammo upgrades mean basically nothing, and missiles are nearly vestigial in this game- I think just mashing attack does more damage than them, by the endgame.

It just feels bad, especially with the long load times between rooms, and the game straight-up enjoys making backtracking miserable. When you've beaten a boss, areas will be repopulated by a very annoying enemy that requires Hyper Mode to kill, and demands your attention with long-ranged, fast attacks. The second and biggest area in the game, SkyTown, also makes you go through these railways which force you into quick aiming minigames and make you restart from the beginning if you get hit- they're extremely obnoxious. The map gets pretty hard to read too, oftentimes, and that sucks because rooms are somewhat hard to distinguish at times. Going through these levels the first time is great, they're gorgeous and full of interesting stuff, but backtracking is a thankless chore, and the game still requires it at time and encourages it at others. Something it deserves praise for though is how it handles the series' traditional endgame fetch quest- previous Metroid Prime games essentially locked most of its collecting until it told you to do so, but Corruption makes the area where you'll use these collectibles available early, and gives you goodies and directions for the macguffins, encouraging the hunt to happen a lot more gradually. It's great fun and definitely the best way they've done it. Something I don't like is how many power-ups are just given to you, I think about half the E-Tanks in the game are literally or nearly literally just put in the main path for you to bump into with zero effort- bit of a shame, after Echoes' elaborate puzzles (which this game does admittedly have a few of).

The last thing to touch upon is the story, so expect spoilers for the first act of the game, and maybe vague allusions to things that happen after. That said... come on, did anyone think the hunters were going to stick around? The intro takes such effort to introduce them all as quickly and as much as it can that it's basically spelled out to you that they'll all meet grisly ends, and indeed, by the time you're knocked out and wake up, they've all been corrupted by Dark Samus, and serve as antagonists, one per area. They're all pretty cool in concept but it all just happens so quickly that I can't help but not care. I'd have loved to see more of Gangrayda's envy of Samus, or Rundas' friendly rivalry with her, but they're all three gone so quickly, and when they're back they're just very very evil and die in the span of one scene. Even if you didn't figure out that something like this would happen, by the time you fight Rundas, the first of the three, it's pretty clear the other two are gone too, and the game never plays with this knowledge in any interesting way. It'd be great if one of the three managed to survive and help you, only to maybe fall to Phazon later, or if one overcame the Phazon corruption, or died but left you a message, I dunno. It'd be cool even if you could learn more of their pre-corruption exploits, but as it is, they're just mid-bosses with a lot of preamble, and that's kind of a shame, especially because Nintendo's previous attempt to introduce rival bounty hunters also flopped pretty hard.

The rest of the story is... fine? I think it straddles a good line, making Samus still very professional but giving us some insight on her feelings, unlike the previous two games where she was frankly just a player avatar most of the time. But, I dunno, it's just Samus fighting a big alien evil guy, no real interesting developments. I like the lore of the various planets, probably my favorite of the three games, despite Echoes' tough competition. I dunno. I'd like to say that Corruption is, in its own way, a worthy sequel to the previous two Metroid Prime games, but I don't really believe that it is. It has some good ideas, some bad ideas, and sort of fails to fall together into a product that's as cohesive and effective as them. It's not committed enough to being an action game to succeed in that regard, and it's not a good metroidvania, so it's sort of nothing at all. But hey, at least it's not Other M.

Historical events in the real world implies that Mario could've had the choice to kill baby Hitler or stop any other monstrosity and he feels it's more important to give Newton his fucking apple back, better yet why doesn't he also go back and just kill Bowser too. Like yeah you'd never get the present that you wanted and Mario wouldn't have a purpose but he's been getting fucked over by this turtle for nearly 40 years now. Too busy surfing to do anything meaningful in his life or contribute to society in the slightest. 1/10

I never played portal 1 but I remember trying Portal 2 years ago, completing it and thinking it was a good time. Just the other day, I decided to give it back a shot and..... OMG I have no idea what I was missing.
When it comes to videogames that are considered "perfect" by the masses, most of the time that definition can feel kind of overused: most title that a lotta people consider perfect are not my perspnal cup of tea.

Not in this case: Portal 2 deserves all of the praises it gets.
It starts without wasting your time, presenting an experience that perfectly mixes creative puzzle solving with physics that feel revolutionary to this day.
Glados, Wjeatley and any other minor NPC have such and amazing writing that you will warm up to them in no time, and a stpry that is able to narrative of a dystopic dark reality while also being extremely goody and enjoyable. You want to stay tp see what these frealy machines will say to you, or how the facility that kept Chell slowly unwraps its own secrets.

It's an amazong game that doesn't stop there: other than the campaign you got a fantastic coop mode (the little I played of it was enough to male it feel fantastic) that links to the main story, and one of the best level creation ever made.
The game is not that long, mostly slowed dpwn by some pf the tougher pizzles, but every second of this experience is enjoyable and absplitely worth it.

Portal 2 is a masterpiece. Everyone should give a shot to this one.

Although I am not at the finish line of P3R just yet, I figured it would be best for me to put out something representative of my love for this game in between sessions, as my thoughts are more thoroughly collected. I am damn near close to 2 consecutive weeks of playing (12/14) and have just breached 60 hours of gameplay. On track to obtain a platinum trophy on my first playthrough, it feels good to be reminded of why I loved an older title I have played, and it feels even better to be reminded that the people behind said game still "get it."

Persona 3 Reload sits comfortably well above the other remakes and remasters of any game I have ever played, and it will continue to do so either for a long while, or forever.

For the longest time, integration of styles and gameplay similar to that of Persona 5 never rubbed me the right way. I was anticipating this game to be a massive stinker. Something in the vein of Atlus trying to cobble together something to milk even more money off of their best selling game. I am sure most people are aware of Persona 5 Tactica, Scramble, and X. I am in not any type of position to commentate on their quality, but the reception of these games amongst my peers has led me to a train of thought to be quite weary of what Atlus decides to output next. But their continuations of an aesthetic spawned from their best selling title into something that is seemingly absolutely unlike it reeked of creative bankruptcy. That being said, I was wrong.

And I couldn not be happier about it.

Everything from the reestablished visuals, voice acting, to the gameplay and even the music. I have not the slightest hint of a complaint or grievance. P3R's UI is an absolute gem to witness, it is fluid, intuitive, and has an identity of its own. The new cast of voices are out of this world, Yuko's especially. All of the voice actors put on a spectacular performance and their ability to encapsulate you in the world of the game is unreal. Having finished P5R's merciless mode and not having that great of an experience, I decided to go into my P3R playthrough with merciless mode, and I am having an absolutely great time with it. Theurgies add much to the strategizing and in addition with keeping the "1 more" system, I enjoy the gameplay so much more for the depth it brings. All of the remixed tracks are wonderful in their own regards, at first stuff like "Mass Destruction" did not rub me too well, but over time I broke in and I love it much like the original track, likewise the others. Truly a remake that lives up to and, in some instances, surpasses the existence of its source. I can not wait to play through P3P and watch the films and whatever extra content there is to finish up the whole complete Persona 3 experience.

Persona 3/FES and Persona 3 Reload will atmospherically provide different experiences (assuming people care about that) but otherwise I honestly can not see a reason to not play this game. It feels so good to be in love with a Persona game again.