They called this shit Penta Tentacles in Europe lol. Out of all of these Art Style games, I honestly think this one is my fav!
Rotozoa shares some similarities with Thatgamecompany's flOw, surprisingly (to me) enough, but with far more of a puzzle game-y spin on the formula of wading across the primordial ooze eating plankton and amoebas. What is essentially just a colour matching challenge can become pretty engrossing with some smart engagement design that stacks wonderfully as you're tasked with an increasing amount of plates to spin. All 35 stages have their own unique bgm, upon which layers are added and excited depending on how much you've grown and how much you're wrecking shop, it's pretty charming!
It's a shame Skip didn't stay active for very long after the release of Rotozoa - you could tell this studio was bustling with ideas. Skip's Art Style / Bit Generation titles very rarely feel as though they've had enough backing to push them past the concept phase, which can certainly be a bit of a charm point, as I genuinely believe that their projects still present themselves incredibly uniquely. Their titles have this confusing, stripped-back air of something that'd appear on your DSi one morning to confuse and scare the piss out of you as if you've just been airdropped some alien spyware. From what I've played or achieved, Rotozoa is the only one of their titles that lives so long it has its own credits sequence.

Now this is Puregaming.
Only learned of ThruSpace while haplessly browsing the now-threadbare wii dot com website out of sheer curiosity. A little official relic of late 00's web design, true to Nintendo's branding and visual language during the Wii era - Latestage Frutiger Aero, Hospital-core, perfectly scaled to suit for your 1024x768 XGA monitor. It's nice, I still love it! Anyway, I looked through the WiiWare page on the still-functioning Japanese wing of the website and the featured titles look great. I was aware of the Bit Generations' gorgeous minimalist games being on the GBA, but they also have WiiWare ports??? I gotta get into somethn!!!!

ThruSpace is dictionary definition neat. A snug 10 mb game w/ no fat. You get your cubes and you get a corridor and you will learn to love them. Not a whole lot to really wax poetic about, it's a simple shape rotation game where you position your tetromino as best you can to maximise your score, with extra feats to strive for in speed, accuracy, and painting the whole gap in if u dare. Looks absolute minty phresh, easy 2 learn hard 2 master. Ultimately I think this is great but find myself losing my grip on the shape's orientation very easily because of how few focal points you're given, I spent a lot of my time panic spinning.
Here's some gameplay from someone only a fraction as good as I am: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1yao_PBRnQ

(Logged as a shoe-in for both the base Monster Hunter: World game, and the Iceborne expansion.)
Lavish & deathly exciting at practically all times - varied and expressive social MMO tissue connecting its numerous multi-layered terrariums of gorgeous arenas and silly monsties.

I do have some background with the series, with much history on Freedom Unite, and far less with the fantranslation of Portable 3rd + 3Ultimate at various points through highschool, and hit the credits of Rise. Freedom Unite came packed with FMV cutscenes that demonstrate how the monsters lived in their downtime - characterising the monsters to assure the player that they weren't merely thoughtless models with movesets to memorise, but individual links in the food chain with roles that keep the world biodiverse & strong.
It was always my favourite part of the game, and what felt like the series' missing hook to really sell me on the core conceit was in how this aspect is somewhat downplayed or unexplored.

By God's grace this was the kind of ecological focus MH:W absolutely relishes in. An interlinking tapestry of ecosystems ticking away, living & interacting in countless ways to make the New World feel so gd raw. And it's not just pageantry either, it plays into behaviours and environment interactions from traps to turf wars. So so so good to head out for a simple hunt to watch it blossom into a scrappy mess of tooth & claw, so so so good to go on aimless expedition to a zone and notice a new handful of behaviours from their endemic life. I’d not be able to sleep at night if I didn’t compliment the chefs on all of this, every monster in every zone is given so much purpose it’s inspiring.

One thing this series has always been great at is its environment design - the world of Monster Hunter is a land of plenty, and everything is blown out of proportion to match. You're eating sirloin steaks the size of your head, oyster side dishes that can feed an army. The tooth you built your hammer out of can sink a ship. Zones and skyboxes that coil across different unique biomes rich in visual stimuli, adding heaps of context for the world and how things are as they are. Pan the camera up at any point and you can assuredly see a spire of choral, ice or crystal towering over you from what appears to be a mile away. Hoarfrost Reach is gorgeous I need to live there NOW.

Moment to moment combat is of course good as hell. I love that it’s slow and weighty enough to separate it from a more typical Capcom character action affair. Even with the amassing layers of QoL the series has glazed itself with, World still focuses on hefty player move commitment and punishment. Every weapon here feels great and each individually recontextualises your approach to any fight, but I found a home with the Dual Blades I’m afraid. I love these stupid ale blades man!!! Basically adored the progression right up until the Furious Rajang, where the game takes a very steep swerve into grind and Raid-like Design territory I find catatonic & diagnostic. The Fatalis fight is so much fun I wish I could solo it 😢

Yo what's up MTV, it's Lieutenant Commander Beach and I'd like to welcome you into my crib

There's nothing here to really sweep me off my feet, but I'm definitely taken by certain aspects of this game's presentation. Seeing a rudimentary 3d simulation from select viewpoints inside of your curated little 2d sprite cockpit is sick beyond actual belief in my humble. I would love to see the vignette captured in a new game with the incredible things we can now do with shaders on sprites.

DAMN 💢💢 THOSE ALIEN BASTARDS ARE GONNA PAY FOR DOWNLOADING MY RIDE ‼️ ‼️ ‼️
There are certainly better games where you hold RT until you reach the end of the track, but few that accomplish this much in so little runtime. Excellent-feeling controls that are a perfect match for the blisteringly fast, topsy-turvy obstacle-courses this'll digitize your way. It could be a bit of a sticking point that the main story isn't particularly difficult, but it's adherence to atmosphere and unbroken speed is more thrilling than the game devolving into Happy Wheels imho. Adore the sound design and the slicing mechanic!!!

https://i.imgur.com/AbGZYCb.png
Game's heavier than a honey baked ham!!!
For every moment in Yakuza 5 that lead me into thinking I was playing an untamed vortex of passion and uncompromised vision, there were two-to-five other uncomplimentary moments that felt like spinning plates and taking the meandering narrative for walkies. Spreads its roots far & wide across so many ideas and gameplay concepts that, on paper, scans as a maximalist daydream I'd love to lose myself in, but all of it feels so perfunctory and checklisty. Fifty different minigames to micromanage and level up in individually to access Harder Levels of said minigames - - - Vidcon Gospel since time immemoria but my patience has limits :(

Haruka's chapter was probably my personal standout, if only with thanks to how vastly different her story played to any character to come before. The rhythm battles were so fun albeit with the game's slim tracklist, and her substories took on a refreshing dynamic too. The combat in these games has never impressed me but I'd much rather play an unimpressive rhythm game than a brawler I've lost heart in. From a narrative perspective, it is infuriatingly complacent with the practices Japanese idol industry in a way I find legitimately toothless in a series that tends to dedicate fisticuffs to rooting out corruption and it makes Haruka's characterisation weaker as a result.
When came the Shinada chapter I was desperately hoping the end credits would finally begin to roll, which is a shame because he and Koichi's dynamic is probably my favourite spark of character chemistry in the entire series.

I in complete honesty couldn't tell you a single thing that happened in the final hours. This was a game I had started months ago and it rather hilariously demanded for me to recall with perfect clarity a cloak and dagger conspiracy that happened in the initial chapters. The overarching story was a wash for me but I much preferred when the leading cast were locked in their own little bubbles, & exploring their own vignettes about dreams lost & worth aspiring 4. Truly believe that in another world, this would have been a younger me's One Playstation 3 Game For The Month and I'd have completely melted into it - but sadly, I had to play this in incredibly granular sessions that largely felt like clocking in for community service.

Pretty fun seeing and agreeing with this tweet yesterday & blindly starting From Dust only to realise it was exactly the same thing.
I think being an observer of the press cycle and online blowback in 2011 for this game coloured my expectations a little - those were my halcyon Born Different, Born Innocent days - I expected shit from a butt I'll be perfectly honest with you. Thoughts and prayers for the unfortunates who purchased this game at release, full price, expecting a fully-fledged God Game by the then on-top-of-the-world Ubisoft. People were pretty scathing as a result of their expectations being sidestepped, to the extent that I was successfully scared away from even trying the game all the way until now, over a decade later.

Anyway I thought this was fine lol. A fun little puzzle game where you worm around a map, scooping up elements and plopping them where they'd hopefully aid and protect your villagers from natural disasters. Hits some surprisingly high notes at points with thanks to some surprisingly good fluid physics and overall level of presentation - making tsunamis, terrain-warping earthquakes and volcano eruptions a truu thrill. Routinely £2 on Steam, which I'd say is apt, but you're honestly better off pirating the thing. The version of uPlay From Dust is packaged with is about ten layers deep into being fucked beyond repair, and the port in general feels like it's peddling to power its own iron lung.

The unenviable task of developing a "revamped and remade version of Princess Maker 2" by truncating PM2 PC's filesize from 50mb to a Super Famicom cartridge's 4mb laid waste to all manner of content and the sloppy debugging is riddled with bulletholes as a result. Even though the presentation here is kind of lovely and I adore the animations for events and the new cast and artwork - this is a game about planting your feet into the matrix, reaching into the fold, and pulling out 50,000 gold coins from the ether alongside a marriage event flag you never asked for.

Pretty great season honestly. The Italo map is up there with the strongest the game has ever had, I don't even mind that I'm playing it on max settings and hitting 40fps because it's worth the lumens. Not keen on mods as someone who thinks games keen out too much on firearms as is, and all its implementation here really accomplishes is making half of the sniper rifle drops useless. The medallions are cool because they’re something of a bluffing game. Is this dude carrying the medallions around because he’s a huge badass who can handle multiple players knowing where he is on the map, or is he just an incompetent iPad 9 year old being kept alive by the stock market value of Peter Griffin Coin. I know the additions of Rocket Racing, Lego Fortnite & Festival are technically counted as entirely new standalone games but it's funnier to consider them as just little distractions/cooldowns for after you and your friends have wrapped up a Battle Royale sesh. Like when it comes down to it the Harmonix skeleton crew created a gamemode that is no better than an Only Up obstacle course map. Rly fun, I've been strapped into the Tim Sweeney metaverse electric chair since 2017 and I don't see myself breaking free any time soon, why should I when the Butter Barn's got butter plate specials that'll treat ya right?

A tremendously handsome visual novel, illustrated by the talented Aogachou. The character designs are pretty good across the board, but the key art in particular is nothin short of breathtaking and captures that brothers grimm vibe the story is trying to shoot for..

Believe me, I find nothing more boring than technical complaints in a video game review, but if this thing was held together with spit and a dream it'd only be more structurally sound. We're talking 'every launch is a dice roll as to whether or not u'll make it past the intro fmv'-grade craftsmanship here.
There is no save system - the text scroll animation is so agonisingly slow - no skip function - crashes constantly - there is a folder in the game's root titled & i'm not shittin u: "BackUpThisFolder_ButDontShipItWithYourGame" lol. At a certain point you just need to cut your losses and just remake the game in Ren'Py my guy.

Apparently the story and screenplay was by Suzuki Kazunari, one of the writers behind Shin Megami Tensei - and more convincingly "Additional Crew" for a bunch of other shit. He's on the Steam store description looking really funny in a little credit portrait they gave him. I dunno man it's kinda rough, yet another unmarinated dark fairy tale from a twisted mind type beat. A horse has sex with a sleeping 14 year old almost immediately as a tone setter. I can't be fucked with it honestly.

Completely captures the feeling of a fantranslated PS2 adaptation of a forgotten 90's shoujo manga. Almost dizzyingly textured & artisanal in its devotion to presenting this kind of rose-thorny traditional German folktale. Feels so genuine, inspired, fully realised in a way I desperately needed as a palate cleanser.

For me to become completely convinced of its gameplay and narrative goals, I’d have to replay it with alternate routes in mind, which I’m not quite able to facilitate with my current limited free time - and Little Goody Two Shoes doesn’t exactly make going down these forks in the story particularly breezy. I don’t tackle games with completionism in mind these days but I find myself a little bummed about how much work I’d need to put into this if I wanted to see the stories I’ve missed. Nothing a timeline/"skip seen dialogue" update somewhere down the line can’t fix, please don’t make me watch a Youtube video.

Wow kind of loved this. One of those plinky ploinky IcoXJourney type games that actually manages to completely seal the deal with some genuinely astounding world design that compliments the character movement. This laser focus on the goal of verticality and the notches inbetween - tactile, weighty, arduous toil as you use your climbing gear to best the challenges the geometry imposes. Gushing with a sense of true scale, milestoned by countless opportunities to pan the camera back at the places you’ve come from and the mountaineering feats you’ve cleared. Dense and well-considered little pockets of civilisation in between crumbling pathways and inclines, full of the kind of coastal town fishery imagery I am a cow for. Beautiful and breathless game imo. Shame it undoes itself with all of these collectables and wordy diary entries that explain away the superlunary mystery of da world, although I’m fickle enough to kind of think I’d have given them a pass if the font choice was more diegetic lol.

Jusant is 1 for da perverts who blush at the Google Image Search: “Abandoned Crab Traps stacked rly high”.