Dragon's Dogma II is all rough edges - intended and otherwise. But as I marched through to its true ending, I came to navigate those the way I can navigate my parents' house in the dark. Sometimes I still stub my toe, but I not only understand all its intricacies but love them. I don't love DD2 despite its flaws, I love DD2 because of them. The game is janky, there are plenty of glitches, the story is weird, and half the time that I completed an objective or reached a goal, I felt like I broke something along the way. But I liked playing in that space and pushing it, figuring out how the game works and embracing where I, and it, fell short.

It doesn't feel like DD2 is a game full of oversights, it just feels like it's a beautifully game-y and authentic creation that has none of the polish that makes a lot of AAA games feel way too smooth. Whenever I had to fight against the controls when scaling a boss or wrestle with the camera, whenever I had to try and find a seemingly despawned NPC, I was intrigued by how I felt like I could see the game's gears turning, like I could see where their teeth didn't quite mesh. This is very subjective but to me I felt like a lot of the hiccups actually helped make the game feel more playable. Like I, and the developers at Capcom alike, would be surprised both intentionally and unintentionally around each corner.

Much has been made about the game's friction, and I think what works most for me about DD2 in this regard is just how dispassionately it treated me as a player. I could screw up questlines if I wanted to (and I did), I could get bodied by an enemy in one brutal hit (and I did several times). It really made the adventure's stakes feel higher, and I think that's part of why the jank was appealing here.

I specifically want to call attention to the geography - I loved how natural it felt. The idea of dispassionate design feels really clear here too, I don't have the typically game-y tools to bend the environment to my will, and it wasn't designed for the sake of convenience. It really felt like Capcom made a fantasy world with little care for how annoyingly tall its mountains would be, how frustratingly wide its rivers would be, how many times I'd get confused and have to consult my map, how many times I'd have to reroute when nature impeded my way. To me these are all positives. It all feels very organic.

Also the combat just rocks. I was playing as a thief and at a certain point DD2 just turned into an open-world character action game. I maxed this vocation out and just stuck with it - curating a set of weapon abilities that let me play this almost like Devil May Cry (Itsuno is one of the greatest to ever do it). Scaling massive bosses is just a perfect mechanic and idea, by the way. Despite the enemy density being way too high in some places I never got tired of the combat because it's just so much fun.

Ultimately, DD2 just let me explore at my own pace, dip into the main quest whenever I felt ready, and generally craft my own adventure, which I greatly appreciate. I felt a Breath of the Wild level of agency here, and that's a hard sentiment to recapture. Highest praise I can give DD2: I will definitely be starting a New Game+ sometime soon, and I never do that. Absolute highlight of 2024.

Good-Feel's name has long become synonymous with accessible fun. Ever since collaborating with Nintendo to realize Wario Land: Shake It!, the studio has become a consistent force in the Nintendo ecosystem, curating platformers that push you only as far as you want to be pushed. They can be enjoyed for their joyous presentation and simply whimsy or they can be dug into: despite Epic Yarn, Woolly World, and Crafted World all being incredibly linear, they are also remarkably explorative. There's so much to discover, the name of the game isn't mechanical challenge but instead curiosity.

This is all a tee-up to particularize my issue with Showtime. The problem isn't a lack of challenge, it's a lack of engagement.

I can't find almost any DNA from Good-Feel's past titles in Showtime, or even many of the touchstones that define Nintendo's larger catalogue. The propulsive force behind the game is a cocktail of auto-running sections, cinematic camera shifts, stilted narrative scenes, and a surprising number of QTEs. When I say that Showtime plays itself, it truly feels like it does - there is no room to experiment or desire to explore. This is one of the least inquisitive games in Nintendo's canon, and certainly the least in Good-Feel's lineup.

How this game ended up feeling so antithetical to both Nintendo and Good-Feel's philosophies, I'm not sure. Is it a different director leading this project? Is it the team's inexperience in 3D game design? I'm not sure, but I have a hard time seeing the vision.

Star Wars: Battlefront II is one of my favorite games of all-time. I played it endlessly as a kid, and even when I got the first Battlefront second-hand later, despite having already played hundreds of hours of the second, I really didn't spend nearly as much time with the original. In the years since, I've continued to revisit Battlefront II across PC and Xbox Series X, barely returning to this first game. Having now replayed the campaigns and messed around in both Galactic Conquest and Instant Action, playing this game deliberately for the first time since I was probably nine or ten, I now realize why.

Everything that I love about Battlefront generally is here, but everything feels clumsier. The guns feel less precise, the movement feels stilted (why would I ever bother going prone), and the units are unbalanced. The Droidekas make playing as the Clones on any non-vehicle map an exercise in frustration, and the inability to do double-zoom a sniper scope as that faction is frustrating too.

There's no doubt that Battlefront simply has a different pace than its sequel - no sprint, no forwards roll, no changing classes at control points, etc. And to that end, these mechanical differences do lend a certain feel to this game than II, but it's not one I prefer. The balance just doesn't feel right to me, and the more arcade-like sensibilities of II are what put it in my top-tier.

I'm hammering in on my complaints largely just to try and articulate why there's a star-and-a-half difference between my score here and my score of the second game, which launched a year later and repurposes these bones entirely.

After all, I'd still rather play Battlefront I than most games that exist; the map selection here is great, certain units like the Dark Trooper are among the most fun in series history, the intrinsic excitement of a conquest match is pretty phenomenal. There's a reason that these games are lauded as being among the very best Star Wars games.

And yes, I am playing via the collection (on Switch). If, like me, you're just trying to play offline it's largely flawless.

I had Jungle Beat as a kid, and I distinctly remember enjoyed the Bongo controls. But I also hold much clearer memories of Konga than of this game. In returning to it as an adult, I see why. Although I really enjoy Jungle Beat, I don't enjoy it as much as I should.

I'm sort of banana split down the middle. Sorry.

The Bongo controls of this game are so joyous and embody a commitment to invention that flows throughout the entire experience. We massively under-evaluate how standardizing control has flatted design possibility. Jungle Beat's ability to force me to rewire the neural pathways that typical fire when I'm trying to platform, because my hands literally have to do something different, is immensely special. And it really works - Jungle Beat should not be as initiative as it is.

But by the end it's also somewhat frustrating, ideas like swimming feeling a bit ill conceived. There are also a few ideas in Jungle Beat's bag of tricks that it leans too heavily on - bosses being a critical example. There are really three bosses that end up being remixed ever so slightly, reducing the dozen-plus bosses to the same trio of gimmicks. It's a bummer, because each fight is framed as this huge crescendo to every Kingdom, but then they're always just some minorly adjusted encounter.

I ultimately can't be overly mad as slapping the Bongos until my hands sting while careening around Jungle Beat's stages is immensely novel. I just wish this game almost was even shorter, pared down to its best hour of ideas, channeling its arcade spirit into something super refined and replayable, stripping what tedium there is from this bone.

I'm not sure how Evening Star knew exactly what sort of platformer I wanted, but they did. Clearly, there was some variety of incepting being done to pull the concept out of my subconscious: this incredibly colorful, joyous, and above all skillful adventure.

I believe that learning how playing games is a skill, and Penny fully embodies this idea. Despite its bubbly exterior, this is a journey that asks you to buckle down and make mistakes as you learn how to maneuver both her and her yo-yo. At first I sucked at the game. I was incredibly bad.

But in remaining dedicated, in really sitting with the mechanics and using the freedom given by Evening Star to experiment, I found myself on this extremely fast skill elevator towards a skill ceiling which seemed to continue receding. I kept learning just how immensely meticulous Evening Star's vision is.

So hang with it and hone your ability. When you're jaunting through brilliantly-colored worlds, dancing across the controller as you glide to one of the greatest game soundtracks of the last several years, Penny is just symphonic.

Kirby & the Amazing Mirror has a lot of issues. It's unintuitive in its structure and straining under the weight of its ambition. The one-way doors and easily lost Copy Abilities of other Kirby games make less sense in the context of Amazing Mirror's entirely contiguous world, and do hamper this experience: one that is much larger and open than both the games which came before and after it.

It's easy to get frustrated while wandering around the circular and seemingly illogical world of Amazing Mirror, tracking down the 8 Mirror Shards needed to finish the game. But in the course of doing so, in the course of really sticking with the game, you come to hear its one refrain louder and louder as you play: "just go explore."

And so I did. I just allowed myself to drift about and learn how the world ticks. What I really appreciate about Amazing Mirror is that it pairs the lax spirit of the full Kirby series with a surprising level of challenge and open-ended design, allowing you to wander through an uncharacteristically hostile world, parsing out its secrets and rules as you go.

Doing so is a lot of fun: figuring out the quirks of the misleading map, discovering how to best employ the help of your friends and AI to explore the beautifully-drawn and exceptionally scored landscape ahead of you. Doubtlessly the best-realized Kirby world aesthetically. The excitement of forging just a bit further, finding the next shortcut door, finding that tucked-away boss fight or health upgrade, is immensely rewarding and deepens the appeal of Kirby without losing sight of the series' basic charms.

After 20 hours with Persona 3 Reload, I'm going to shelve it for now. In those twenty hours I was surprisingly captivated by the game despite being largely uninterested in JRPGs or life sims - the latter being the dimension of the game I enjoyed the most.

What halted my progress in P3R is generally its sense of repetition, particularly throughout Tartarus. I found its seemingly endless, faceless depths to be fairly mindless to ascend through, a major bummer when the combat is so satisfying. Even the rote daily schedule began to wear a bit, which was a clear signal that I needed a break.

I do hope to return to P3R due to how captivating the storyline is, and how intrigued I am to develop a lot of my social links. I was simply beginning to feel like I was going through the motions for the sake of not losing my momentum towards P3R's conclusion, rather than playing it solely for the enjoyment of the in-game moment.

Metroid Prime 1 is among my favorite games of all-time. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes is a game that I barely like. It's a bigger, more unwieldy and more frustrating version of its predecessor that does little to iterate on its foundations.

Metroid Prime 3, by contrast, is something different entirely.

From its earliest moments, Metroid Prime 3 is very much NOT like its predecessors. The game has a foregrounded, talkative narrative with the sort of cinematic presentation that's mostly anathema to Prime 1 design philosophy and the reputation the first game established. Interestingly, its narrative focus and linear progression feel very much in step with Metroid Fusion, another game I love.

And that's probably why I enjoy Corruption nearly as much as the untouchable Metroid Prime 1. In continuing to reject the conventions of its predecessors, Corruption is full of action set pieces. This is much closer to a conventional FPS than either of the games that came before (Echoes' multiplayer aside). I like that a lot.

The Metroidvania genre, on the whole, is one that I don't care that much for. The later Shantae games, Prince of Persia: The Last Crown, these are a few of the only non-Metroid Metroidvanias that I truly enjoy. I'm drawn to Metroid by its worldbuilding, art direction, and sense of place (and all the ways it's evoked).

I'm also massively drawn to Samus Aran: the badass intergalactic action hero.

This is the version of the character that childhood me was introduced to through Smash Bros., and the version of the character I found when I rented Prime 3 as my first Metroid title way back when. I was too young to understand the game and get past Norion. But it forged my connection to this character and world, a connection I'd later strengthen in high school when I truly got into the series.

Many people will claim that the Metroid series' pivot towards action began with Other M and then was followed through by MercurySteam, and while I agree that Other M turned the action dial to 10 before MS cranked it to 16, I truly believe that Corruption is where the 'modern' depiction of Samus was born. Think about the fight with Ridley on Norion, the huge battle alongside Galactic Federation Troopers on the Space Pirate home world. Samus builds and detonates a nuclear bomb and escapes from its blast after a massive point-defense firefight. Corruption brought Samus to an entirely new echelon of cool.

And the Wii brought Samus to a new level of realism. I totally appreciate that the motion-controlled keypads and locks and levers are a relic of 2007, but I really enjoy the life they imbue in the character. To me, they're an extension of seeing the rain fall on Samus' visor on Tallon IV. These choices were doubtlessly mandates to illustrate what the hardware was capable of back near launch, but I just don't mind.

It's very easy for me to look at Prime 3 and understand why it's not widely held in the regard that I hold it in. The game is very linear, many of its secrets are not hidden well or at all. It's bigger, louder, more cinematic and less archetypally Prime-like. But almost none of that matters to me because this feels like the massive action-packed Metroid spirit that defines most of my favorite games in the series, while retaining the immersive, inquisitive quality and attention to detail that define Prime 1 and 2.

So glad I finally saw this one all the way through.

Star Fox 64 is my favorite game of all-time, and yet Star Fox: Assault is the only other game in the franchise (having now played all of them aside from Guard) that I enjoy.

Throwing Command onto the pile of dislikes was a particular disappointment as I do love a lot of its ideas. The stronger narrative makes the branching paths of Star Fox all the more purposeful, and I love seeing this cast get fleshed out in the mini-continuity that the early-mid '00s attempted to offer Star Fox.

But what really turned me off from even finishing a single route here is the excessively frustrating strategy component; the map which feels more like a trial-and-error endeavor than a dynamic chess board. And when the reward for making the right move is a seconds-long All Range mission (the worst sort of Star Fox mission, imo), it's hard to push through the tedium.

One of the few 'Wii series' games I didn't have as a kid, experiencing Wii Play: Motion was both an uncannily familiar and decidedly fresh experience. Motion well expands upon the ideas of its predecessor in a package that not only feels fuller but a lot more modern, certainly the Resort to its Wii Sports.

With a veritable who's-who of hit-or-miss second string Nintendo (or Nintendo-adjacent) teams taking the collaborative helm of the project, the quality of Motion feels like a larger spread than Wii Play. Any mini-games developed by Good-Feel and Vanpool rock. Everything else is of a variable degree of success.

The best activities in Motion are more robust than anything in Wii Play (sometimes iterating on and expanding past Wii Play attractions), but many others feel either too fickle in their MotionPlus control or too gimmicky in their conecpt.

Link's Crossbow Training can currently be picked up for single dollars from just about any random retro game shop or eBay storefront. It's lost what little value it had at launch as a Wii Zapper pack-in, relegated mostly to a joke within the Nintendo community. But in reality this is a really well-designed and nuanced light gun game with the level of polish that you'd expect from a Nintendo EAD game. There's really no reason for Link's Crossbow Training to be reevaluated on a larger cultural level because it's such a low-impact title, but I do think it's an extremely replayable and fun entry in its genre. A lot more depth and density in the missions than I expected, and a lot more risk vs. reward in the combo-based gameplay than it appears. Definitely worth checking out, especially for how cheaply it can be found.

I beat the Early Access iteration of Ex-Zodiac while sitting with my family, who were watching Food Network Star. The premise of the show is that a roster of chefs compete in various challenges head-to-head, and the last chef standing gets their own Food Network series. Interestingly, the contestant who went home on tonight's episode did so because they lacked a unique point of view which their hypothetical show could hinge on, despite being immensely skilled technically.

That's sort of how I feel about Ex-Zodiac. It's not a finished game, it's not a "Food Network Star" just yet. This pre-release, this competitor form (to stretch the metaphor further), is a technically successful Star Fox-like rail shooter. It plays quite well. But right now, to me, it mostly lacks a unique point of view.

Ex-Zodiac is obviously and clearly owed entirely to Star Fox (with the occasional straight-up Space Harrier mission thrown in). And given Star Fox 64 is my favorite game ever, really good indie Star Fox is a great thing. But I've not gotten sick of 64 to this point and I don't expect to - I'm happy to just endlessly return there.

So I need some original concept which takes the incredibly strong bones of Ex-Zodiac and fleshes them out (probably should stop mixing my cooking metaphors and my flesh metaphors). And I see it in fits and spurts. In the Radiant Silvergun, Treasure-styled bosses and their screen-filling 'WARNING' text. In the multi-target lock-on system. In the exceptional land vehicle stage, which is far more Akira than Star Fox Landmaster, which I really enjoyed.

Above all, I'm excited to see Ex-Zodiac grow, iron out its issues, and develop from a really solid Star Fox "clone" with excellent fundamentals into something that stands fully on its own two feet.

Sonic Lost World is just a disaster. I ended up tapping out at the first Zavok fight in Sky Road, when I realized that I was continuing to play solely out of spite.

What makes Sonic Lost World immensely frustrating is that at its best, the game is immensely playable and quite cinematic in-Act (the 'cinematics' are woeful with horrendous dialog, on the other hand). It's both hyper-linear and quite dynamic, freeing the player from the boost formula which dominated Sonic's previous 3D era. In a better game, the base-level concepts here would be quite refreshing. But they're not in a better game: they're in a game whose shoddy physics and copious jank don't play well with already shaky level design.

To play Sonic Lost World is to ride a carousel of first-pass ideas and innovative sources of frustration. Lost World surprises, but it certainly doesn't delight.

It took me a while to come around on this one. When Rift Apart launched on PS5, I stayed up until midnight to play it - but I never ended up beating the game. I found the dual Ratchet / Rivet perspective to be somewhat pointless in that they played exactly the same, I didn't really buy into the narrative, it just didn't work for me.

Receiving a Steam Deck OLED for Christmas, I bought Rift Apart during the Steam Sale to give it another go.

I'm glad that I did - as I really ended up enjoying the game significantly more this time around. I still think it's quite flawed and I echo some of my prior issues: I outright skipped every Clank / Kit puzzle sequence, it managed to bring its combat to a place of repetition often by repeating the same few mini-bosses constantly, and the whole "I'm still working on myself" therapy-laden narrative just didn't really entice me. I know that's ultimately a reductive framing of the story but I grow weary of every character in the game learning to love themselves and their friends and heal and forgive - maybe I'm just cynical but it felt shallow to me.

Where the plot succeeds though, and where Insomniac's incredible talent shows though, is in how the game navigates its massive set pieces. There are countless moments across the campaign that feel massive and orchestral - incredible boss encounters or traversal sequences that are exceptionally cinematic but remain interactive, the SSD throwing you between dimensions or characters to build contiguous and awe-inspiring sequences.

It's all just so smooth, the entire game is near frictionless and hyper-chaotic in its spectacular (in multiple senses of the term) combat. I had a great time just muscling through wave after wave of wimpy enemies with my rolodex of bizarre firearms. That's great stuff.

Despite having a lot of issues with Rift Apart, this is really is the ideal AAA blockbuster to me. A concise playtime, massive set pieces that flex the team's design skill without sacrificing playability, and a great game feel throughout.

As a sidebar - we know now that Rift Apart cost Insomniac 80 million to make. Frankly, that investment resulted in a game that looks and feels more evidently premium than the 315 million dollar Spider-Man 2. A massive shame that Rift Apart wasn't a commercial success.

I've long maintained that F-Zero X is the best in the series, having played the game off-and-on over the years since first buying an N64 copy in high school. Sitting down with the game to see all the cups (aside from the bonus X cup) through now, I'm more assured in that perspective - particularly given the amount of GX I've played since my last concerted visit to X.

What X does so well, and better than GX in my opinion, is that it manages to evoke an unparalleled sense of speed while retaining a high degree of moment-to-moment clarity. The more densely-designed tracks of GX are more memorable, but X strips its aesthetic to the bone to lock you into the bare thrill of racing. It's quite a miracle that X moves this fast and this seamlessly on N64.

The game recognizes that spectacle can come from the intrinsic velocity with which X throws you around the track. It's an extremely enrapturing and precise moment-to-moment experience. Paired with plenty of unlockables and a novel (if incredibly shallow) Death Race mode, this really is a pinnacle racing title.