A really fun and surprisingly more substantial game than i was expecting. Unlike Tetris 99, every mode in this game is free and there are always active events that you can participate in, in addition to the default 99 mode. There's even an offline practice mode and some customization options for you car, which doesn't really affect game-play at all but is cool nonetheless.

The actual game-play in 99 mode is very hectic and most of the time it doesn't feel like you have too much control over what's going on, but somehow I still found it fun, and if that's not your style there are other game-modes offered in the events section such as classic races. The UI design in my opinion is way better than Tetris 99, and one really cool detail I'd like to mention is that there are a ton of references to and usages of classic F-ZERO art, which I found really cool.

This game definitely goes above whatever expectations I had for a free F-ZERO game and is an awesome and much needed bonus reason to actually pay for Nintendo Switch online.

Halo: Combat Evolved is a fun but flawed game that unfortunately shows its age in quite a few ways. This game shines brightest when it shows off its unique and incredible locations, each with their own incredible atmospheres, and ties it all together with its very interesting story. Unfortunately however this game is not always at its best. A good portion of the game is spent navigating tight corridors, often seeing the same rooms copy and pasted over and over again, and fighting the same bunch of enemies. Master chief is fun to control in combat, however a few controls feel a bit outdated or awkward, such as the vehicle controls and lack of a zoom button while shooting. This game also suffers from not really having a proper waypoint system. Despite all of the levels being pretty linear it's still very easy to get lost due to the often confusing and repetitive map design. Overall Halo's biggest problem is its repetitiveness. Whether it be enemies, weapons, or maps, after a certain point you'll start to feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again. The story is definitely still interesting however and though repetitive it is fun. Despite its rough patches I'm very glad I completed this game and would still recommend checking it out.

As the proud owner of a VW bug myself, this is essentially the perfect game for me. It fulfills my ultimate fantasy; what if my car could fly 200 feet into the air and had an explosive rocket launcher? Really though this game is super fun. You can pick from a few magnificent colours for your bug and play by yourself or against friends in a few different styles of races, or take them on in this game's best mode; beetle battle. Imagine the mariokart battle modes but on crack and you have a beetle battle. All of the items (yes, this game has mariokart style items.) are super fun and perfect for causing large amounts of chaos. Your car can shoot rockets, achieve super speed, and plant land mines among a few other things. Also this game has some surprisingly decent music, which adds a lot to its charm. I’m not kidding when I say Beetle Adventure Racing is one of the most fun promotional/licensed games ever made.

I'm probably going to repeat a lot of similar points that Larry Davis brought up in his review, so... what he said.

14 years after The Forgotten Sands, Prince of Persia is finally back, and the folks over at Ubisoft Monpellier understood the assignment: crap up good movement and puzzle solving with dreadful combat and an over-reliance on mobs of spongy enemies.

Parrying and punishing is the bread and butter of Sargon's kit, a rhythm you want to maintain to build meter for more devastating abilities, but when you're just trying to get to your next objective or explore some crypt, constantly getting beaned from all sides by low-level goons that have a bafflingly high HP pool gets really annoying. You might think bosses better leverage this system being that they're one-on-one encounters, but most fall into the same rote strategy of playing defensively until they open themselves up for a cinematic counter.

At least one of these bosses actively punishes dynamic play by spamming teleports and parries when the player behaves aggressively, resulting in a fight that requires you sit Sargon in a corner so the boss will fall into a pattern of throwing out the same three attacks, permitting you to plink away at his health at the end of each sequence. I'm pretty sure this isn't an intentional lesson so much as the AI doesn't know how to deal with you remaining still, but I would describe combat as being bizarrely passive despite how much you're given to work with.

The pendulum does eventually swing in the other direction when you gather up enough ingots to upgrade Sargon's weapons, but enemies never quite keep pace with the player's growth, resulting in a game that's entirely too frustrating in the early half and almost comically easy in the second.

And sure, you might argue that a search-action game is all about making the player feel progressively more empowered as they plumb the depths of whatever hostile labyrinth they're trapped in, but almost all the gains Sargon actually makes are bought and paid for with time crystals. In Super Metroid, Samus slowly gains abilities and expands her inventory through exploration. In Symphony of the Night, Alucard can find a variety of capes, armors, and weapons that allows the player to directly build their character. While The Lost Crown's most secluded areas occasionally house a heart container or equipable charm (most of which are borderline useless), they'll more often dead end with 40 crystals and a piece of paper with a full length Backloggd essay written on it -- I ain't reading that, I don't have time! Growth feels far more tied to the economics of the world and what you can afford than it does exploration. Hell, sometimes you'll even go out of your way to reach a secret alcove and find there's nothing at all.

Before I punch out from my shift at the hot take factory, where I work as a foreman to support my factory wife and my 2.5 factory kids, I will say that Lost Crown is a much more enjoyable experience when you decouple yourself from the typical search-action loop of exploring every nook and cranny and instead focus on the main path. There's some genuinely great platforming sequences and puzzles that make good use of Sargon's traversal abilities, and the layout of Mount Qaf is easy to read and navigate your way through thanks to the game setting objective markers and allowing you to photograph areas of interest for quick reference on the map.

The story has its share of contrivances, especially early on, but I did find myself surprisingly invested by the end of the game, and although most characters can be described as "well-meaning but criminally and suicidally stupid," the concept of Mount Qaf existing within a bubble of fractured space and time is enough to carry the narrative whenever the character writing falls short. I really like the idea that every character and NPC is perceiving time differently, some being displaced by decades whereas others are made to exist within a singular moment for eternity.

Lost Crown doesn't stick the landing for me. It gets a lot about the search-action formula wrong, particularly with character growth and incentivizing exploration off the beaten path. The combat is rough and excessive, and sometimes you'll spend ten minutes throwing yourself to a meat grinder trial-and-erroring your way through pattern memorization all for a pair of pants, but there's still something here. Traversal feels good, the visual design is great, and the core loop is satisfying enough to elevate Lost Crown from being a bad game to being perfectly mediocre, maybe even serviceable. In other words, it's a Prince of Persia game.

Gonna buy a shirt that says "I'd rather be playing Touhou Luna Nights."

I do not know a single person who didn't cry at the end of this game. You're a fucking bitch, I'm a fucking bitch. Let's tug on this thread of emotional repression and bawl like infants.

What is Mother 3? I genuinely don't know. A journey in processing grief and trauma? How the world and everything you know changes under malevolent force? That we are all fated to die, so make the little moments count? Cowboy ninjas are an evergreen combination? Maybe the game is trying to tell us frogs in little red cars are peak pixel art. Like I said, I don't fucking know what I was supposed to take away from the game. I am just genuinely happy I experienced it.

This game is not as good as Earthbound, but it has better combat and it's themes definitely stand on it's own. It's much darker, but it gives more pop when something silly/absurd happens.

My question is what's up with the manly fairies. Are they trans? Are they an exaggeration of drag queens? I don't know what's going on with them, but I don't know why one had to do something very, VERY fucked that caused this game to never be officially translated or ported and it NEVER WILL BE. Itoi absolutely lost his mind and did something very brave and I can't say that it landed. You know what I'm talking about. They went to a place NO OTHER GAME went to and I don't know why they used the fairies to do it. Seems subtextually and overtly disrespectful to the LGBT community. If that's what it takes to get psychic powers I'll hop in that hot spring but like are we SURE like I couldn't watch a Youtube tutorial or take a community college course?

Can you imagine Iwata or Miyamoto playing a review copy of this game because they famously didn't give a shit as it was in development for like 10 years -- and their eyeballs shooting out of their sockets at that scene? Straight up, people high up did not see that scene before it released, because after it released -- this game was put in jail. I can't say I blame them. It seems really difficult to edit that scene out to because there's a good 10-15 minute sequence that's important to the plot that if was cut out would make things fall apart.

Lucas being a crybaby bitch makes people resent him, but his tears are warranted. You have to take step back and realize what this kid has gone through and is still willing to kill turbo Donald Trump for the remaining good left in his world. He is the best of us.

It's a beautiful, messy journey that will have you caring about your own life and the impact you have in it. That's Mother 3' gift. It's other gift to you is making you cry like a motherfucker; 3-4 times at least. If you're reading this and you DIDN'T cry at all then you're a Porky ass bitch. Go to therapy.

Wherever you landed on how you feel about the game, you can agree that we don't get real shit like this all that often. I invite anyone who read all this to tell me what the game meant to you. Even if you identify with being a Porky ass bitch. This game changes people. I will always be curious by the impact highly emotional media has on others.

It has a character named Kino...

Future Connected takes place one year after the events of Xenoblade Chronicles and takes Shulk and Melia to an unexplored region of the Bionis, where they stumble upon two stowaways who help them against the seemingly untouchable Fog King terrorizing the local people. Yes, this premise is pretty basic, but it's more of an expansion to round off Melia's character arc than an actual story expansion.

The highlight and key aspect of Future Connected is the exploration of Bionis' Shoulder, a previously unreleased area that has been planned ever since the original release of Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii, but never made the cut. Now it has been repurposed as the central setpiece of the epilogue and I'm quite glad for this decision, as it's easily one of my favorite areas in the game now and I had a lot of fun exploring it. There are many great views and it looks particularly cool during thunderstorms (even better when there's a cutscene playing). Fairly early on you're introduced to the Ponspectors, a group of archaeologist Nopon, who have lost their boss and now are scattered all across the Shoulder, where you can pick them up (most of the times you need to do a short quest beforehand) and add them to your own personal Nopon army. This literal army of furball companions not only deals passive damage during combat, but also replaces the chain attacks with some QTE combos, which can be upgraded by adding more Ponspectors to your squad. They're also masters of taking a toll on the framerate, as things can get seriously laggy when there's a dozen Nopon hammering away on a bunch of enemies during a thunderstorm while several other flashy animations are playing. Despite this, I thought the Ponspectors were a fun change of pace in terms of combat usage, but there was something else I disliked instead in terms of combat, and that's the removal of vision attacks. This sounds insane at first, considering vision attacks only make your life harder, but the thing is that they're still in the game, you're just not informed when the enemy will hit you with them anymore. Always a pleasure to see a boss hit you with "Attack VIII" without warning just to survive with a mere sliver of health, so the existence of the Shield and Impulse Monado Art hardly justify themselves in Future Connected, as they are practically useless - you're better off using the Armor Art instead.

I don't think the story present here is that bad, just considerably weaker than the main narrative, which is to be expected from a free expansion that released 10 years after the source material. For me the main issues are the underwhelming villains (the fate of one major villain here is literally revealed in a sidequest) and the lack of any real stakes here, so the true highlight are the character interactions instead. The heart-to-heart mechanic from the main game has been rebranded to "quiet moments" and is now available anytime after certain points in the story have been passed, as long as the time is right and the party members you need for the support are in your current party setup. They're also fully voiced and do not require any previous affinity building between characters, which is something that would be very cool to see in future Xenoblade games (or atleast Xenoblade 3, considering 2 released before Future Connected), as voice acting alone in these moments can make them a lot more impactful and memorable already. While Kino's and Nene's supports help characterize Riki further, Melia's are particularly interesting as she as a person had to undergo significant changes after the events of the main storyline. Shulk takes the backseat here and is more of a mentor for the Nopon kids, which is sweet in its own way.

To wrap it up, it's a nice little bonus campaign after the grand scope of Xenoblade's main story and I'd recommend it to anyone who just wants more of the same. As far as I know, Future Connected is ultimately skippable, but there's no harm in giving it a try atleast - else you're missing out on some fantastic tracks like the Bionis Shoulder battle theme or the Fogbeasts encounter theme.