A brilliant, insanely charming, instantly enjoyable gem of a game. A relic of a sadly bygone era, where Playstation (for which Katamari Damacy was originally an exclusive) were willing to publish weird, mid-budget games with eccentric presentation and weird ideas. There's nothing like Katamari out there anymore.

Its controls are really wonky in that up and down on the directional stick don't move you forward and back, but they move you around the circumference of the ball - and then you use the other stick to move once you've oriented yourself. It's a bit hard to get used to - but I think it's to the game's benefit and adds a lot of personality. If it were as cut-and-dry as "move forward to go forward" and "move back to go back" the game would be too easy, this gives it a unique feeling and makes it satisfying to get to grips with, and I think also adds a bit of depth to what would otherwise be a pretty shallow experience.

Katamari has this brilliant, off-kilter sense of humour. The King is such a fucking weido, frequently making weird remarks during levels in which he's asked you to roll up as many women or bears or crabs or whatever-the-fuck-else as you can possibly find. He lambasts you in-between levels and makes fun of your height and the size of your head, he roasts you for your failures but also gets really excited if you manage to roll up a big enough cow. I love him. He's my absolute GOAT. We will never see another video game character like The King Of All Cosmos. The game's levels also just frequently throw shit at the wall with no care for logic. Here's a couple of giant 100-foot-tall wrestlers swinging eachother around in the middle of the beach, here's a panda bear floating down from the sky on balloons, here's a random-ass unnamed kaiju that looks like Gigan from Godzilla rampaging through the middle of the ocean. Sure. Fuck it. Why not?

I'm particularly impressed by levels like the bear level and the cow level in which you're tasked with rolling up one of a single thing in the world and can finish the level no matter how big or small that thing (bear or cow) is, but are encouraged to get a bigger one to get a better score. In these levels it's not just about what you can roll up, it's about what you can't roll up (or, shouldn't, which is small bears or cows). You go around the whole level trying to pick stuff up and get bigger so you can get a bigger bear/cow for a better score, but the whole time you're having to dodge smaller bears and cows like your fucking life depends on it so the level doesn't just end and your hard work isn't wasted for nothing. It gets increasingly harder to dodge these things the bigger you get and the more ambitious you become in your bear/cow size hunt! It's a super smart inversion of the game's mechanics and in a really gutbusting way gets you super paranoid that you're about to roll over a tiny bear that you're too big to see now en route to the one you actually want! You start hallucinating bears and cows that aren't even there!! What the fuck do you mean this tiny-ass milk carton with a picture of a cow on it counts as a cow?? In the most loving way possible, absolutely fuck off man!! (I love this shit)

It's funny all the time, and it's fun all the time, because it wraps up in like 5 hours before it can even begin to get old. And do I even need to mention the soundtrack? This shit could chart it's that good, I mean it in the best way when I say that this game's OST is like a bunch of people doing bad impressions of Nujabes and Frank Sinatra. I fucking loved it, it's everything modern Playstation should be but isn't

A revolution in game design, it's not hard at all to see why Dark Souls has been so influential in more modern games. It's so rare that you see a developer who are;

#1: So willing to let players miss out on huge swathes of content by tucking away entire, interconnected areas behind secrets, and;

#2: Willing to be so thoroughly, unapologetically evil to the player. Brutal boss fights, little to no handholding, enemies constantly ambushing you and hiding behind corners, NPCs who betray you and so much more.

You combine these things, and you have a recipe for player immersion. I'd be willing to bet that a large majority of the reason players talk up how consumed they were by Dark Souls is due to how "hands off" the game is. It never explains any of its countless nuances, it leaves the player to their own devices to discover how certain mechanics work; how to survive enemy attacks by using the I-frames on your roll, how to dual-wield weapons or use a shield in tandem with another one or use a single weapon with both hands. During my playthrough on stream, I shot arrows at the pressure plates in Sen's Fortress to trigger them without stepping on them, and my chat totally popped off. None of them had ever seen someone do that or even thought to do such a thing and it worked! That was so sick, and also I'm a genius! If more games were willing to trust their players to think for themselves and experiment, they might be hailed as just as immersive.

It's incredibly impressive how many builds and playstyles Dark Souls' combat and systems allow for, combine that with the non-linearity and potential for constant sequence-breaking with its world as open and interconnected as it is and you have a game that's also extremely replayable. At its best, Dark Souls honestly feels like an edgier and less clunky 3D Zelda only designed by people who hate you.

There are a couple things that hold it back from the complete top score for me. The second half of the game noticeably dips in quality from the first, it never quite reaches the heights of Anor Londo and Sen's Fortress again once those areas are over, and some areas like Tomb Of The Giants are outright unenjoyable for me, even as someone who likes difficulty. The Bed Of Chaos is an obviously awful boss in every regard so notorious that I hardly even feel the need to go off on it, the menu'ing is pretty clunky and unintuitive and I personally don't like having to do the "run up" to a boss again every time you die to it. I love difficulty, but I don't think that's interesting difficulty or gameplay - it just seems like padding to me, and it's especially frustrating against bosses like Gwyn who are pretty brutal and whose fight can be over in about 30 seconds, yet you have to do a like - 3 minute run-up to every time you wanna rematch him. Ugh.

Still though, anything I can find wrong with this game pales in comparison to its achievements. Very few developers have the balls to do the things Dark Souls does. In my playthrough, dastardly NPC Lautrec who betrays you if you let him live backflipped off a cliff during our fight and just died, I just got his item for free and the game just let me roll with it. Now THAT's game design. No restrictions, no refusing to let players cheese out a W, just dudes backflipping off cliffs. Fuck yeah, Dark Souls. Fuck yeah.

Pokemon Scarlet/Violet are an event horizon for Pokemon games. It is actually unbelievable how unfinished these games are. It's when playing these games that you realise that every single Pokemon game since they went 3D about 10 years ago has been unfinished. Every single one has blacked out the screen in place of actual animations whenever a character does anything even remotely active, every single one up until now has re-used the same Pokemon models and attack animations, and every single one has had barebones world design, plot and characters that you're just railroaded along with no freedom because the devs likely didn't have time to design anything other than an incredibly linear experience.

When I tell you this game is unfinished, I mean that there are frame drops during the opening cutscene and the CREDITS. THE CREDITS. THERE ARE LITERALLY FRAME DROPS ON A BUNCH OF FUCKING NAMES SCROLLING DOWN A BLACK SCREEN. This game's technical performance is unbelievable in the absolute worst way, there is never a moment where its utter lack of polish is not a total distraction. Frame drops, hideous PS2-looking textures, egregious pop-in everywhere you go, NPCs fading out of existence because they can't make it up a flight of stairs, Pokemon turning invisible mid-battle. I could go on. I have never played a game in a state as rough as this.

And what pisses me off the most about that is that it puts a huge damper on what is otherwise a really fucking good Pokemon game, the best since Generation 5, in my opinion. Fundamentally, from a design perspective, I think this is just really good shit - it does a lot of things I've been pining for from the series for a long time. The open world isn't a lie, it truly is open! Shockingly so, in fact! Even with the supposedly open world being all over the marketing I really was expecting this game to do the classic Pokemon, "oh you can't go there yet there's been an outbreak of Sugma" or whatever and have some fuckin' dude blocking my way at 3/4 of the exits of every city, but nope! You really are just let loose in this world, allowed to beeline straight to areas with Level 50+ trainers and Pokemon and get your ass beat right away! It's super refreshing to not have my hand held every step of the way! Yet it does subtly tell you which parts of the map are intended to be taken on later through some nice and sensible design. There's a cave in the southwestern part of the map that leads to a city with a gym, but to get through the cave your "mount" (the game's "box legendary") needs to unlock a high jump that you get from progressing elsewhere in the game. HOWEVER that city is not blocked off from you entirely early on because there's a slightly harder-to-find hidden path that lets you get to the city without needing to unlock the upgrade! Wow! Thanks for telling me that the area is hard but not entirely blocking me off from going there anyway, Game Freak! Junichi Masuda leaves and suddenly you learn game design! What's up with that?

Scarlet and Violet despite having similarly condescending and 2-dimensional dialogue (even by kid's game standards) to previous Pokemon games, do also genuinely have a pretty good story! There's some interesting stuff going on here ESPECIALLY towards the game's climax! Narrative-wise, I think the last 4 hours or so of this game are some of the best stuff Pokemon has ever done!

A shame then, that all the cutscenes and moments around this part of this game and indeed all the way through are undercut by the devs only having time to put like 6, whack-ass MIDI sounding songs in it, and having to constantly watch hideous textures glitch out in the background whilst none of the characters emote or animate at all. At this game's emotional climax, it plays this incredibly cheap, wafer-thin "emotional music cue" song that you've heard numerous times throughout the game, and that on top of everything else just robs it of all its emotional weight. This game frequently deserves better. It has genuine freedom, a fair and reasonable sense of difficulty and challenge and a story with far more intrigue and nuance behind it than any other Pokemon game in the last decade. What a shame that it's buried under the weight of what has to have been a horrible amount of crunch.

For the first time in a long time I find myself feeling sympathy for Game Freak. No dev ever wants to release a rushed or unfinished game, and they will definitely have KNOWN what state it was in before it came out. There is no doubt in my mind that the state of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are far less to do with incompetence on Game Freak's part and far more to do with corporate interference and this increasingly ridiculous and unsustainable "new generation every 3 years" release pattern that well and truly killed them here.

How sad. If these games had been given another year or even 6 months in the oven they would have absolutely been the best Pokemon games ever in my mind. My dream scenario is that some kind of "Deluxe" version of these games comes out in a few years (and maybe for SwSh too, which were also clearly unfinished) for the next, more powerful Nintendo console that includes all the DLC from jump, HUGELY touches up the graphics and technical performance, adds in some new animations and general polish and maybe adds just a few little extra bits of content here and there. Realistically I think the best I can hope for is that they continue on with Scarlet/Violet's open world design philosophy in the next games, which I'd like to get excited for! But if they have to shit out another one in just another 3 years?

I don't know. Just give them more time next time. Jesus christ.

Loved it. Franken is one of the most focused games I've ever played. It has the courage to strip away complicated gameplay in order to center the story, humor, and art in a way that works so perfectly - by deliberately simplifying the combat system, the game removes any pretense of trying to do something special with it, expertly setting your expectations and allowing you to clearheadedly enjoy everything else it has to offer. It's so naturally funny in a way that just makes me feel really nice. The length of the game is also a strength, the whole experience being just an hour long also contributes really well to the focus and makes it so easy to just enjoy in a single short sitting. Can't wait to see what else splendidland makes in the future!

Genshin Impact is certainly uhhh, something.

Or at least, it really wants to be something, it takes a lot of different things and smashes them together, somehow coherently, in the hopeful goal of being a something. But it really doesn't, it's not a something at all.

That's the long and short of it, but let me break stuff down to the specifics. Genshin takes a shitton of inspiration from other ps4 anime titles (weirdly Atelier Ryza kept coming to my head), BotW, and korean mmos in this weird mesh of trying to be a hack n slash anime open world. You have exploration, dungeons and character class and element mechanics, a pretty standard anime story, and a somewhat sweet vibe in the visuals. But like, each every one of these components are soulless, they don't really come together to make anything special, they're just there.

Exploration is route and boring, with a lot of fucking about getting numbers to go up and seeing very uninteresting sights. You might find some neat gear but gear generally just means number and stat ups rather than anything of much worth.

Mechanics boil down to being very simple, mostly picking whichever buttons you want to mash to make enemies keel over because enemy design asks nothing of you and all characters can functionally instawipe a group in their own way. Elemental play leads to very particular lock and key options but not anything dynamic, sheikah slates and element play of BotW it certainly isn't or really trying to be, it's just dressing.

The vibe itself is very disturbingly stolen from BotW, with the overworld music using the same kind of piano timbre that goes back to it, but it's just MISSING something. It's easy to say it's just missing a soul, but there's more to it, there's not even a sense of direction to what the music is playing. It feels ethereal but in the bad kind of sense, the one where you're playing around anime open world limbo rather than something serene.

I won't deny that the game at least looks pleasant, if anything that was the one thing I enjoyed in the amount of time I spent, getting a literal "ooo pretty" out of my mouth in the first five or so minutes. I guess another plus in this game's direction is that the gacha isn't overbearing as it is basic f2p design really, it's pushed in your face once and then it at best only subconsciously works for people going for completionism shit. From what I've been told, you can clear the story just fine without interacting with the shop at all, so that's nice.

That's kind of all the positive sentiment I can scoop up for this though, it really just kinda sucks otherwise. None of this ends up with Genshin Impact having its own identity, being something from even just one of its parts much less the sum. It really feels like a game made for eastern audiences that does 'just' enough to be relaxing and comfy to waste time in, but then offer nothing in return. Originally I was going to make this review just as I tweeted about it, saying that Genshin Impact is just Destiny 2 for eastern audiences.

I don't really even know about that anymore though, there is certainly a lot more I can give and recommend about Destiny, this is just going to be an afterthought eventually.

I think Super Mario Odyssey is a super original and inspired piece of art. I don't think it's an amazing video game. There are so many cool ideas in this game, so many instances of the developers clearly having tons of fun with what they're making and letting their imaginations run wild but unfortunately I think it coalesces into a very unfocused game that never really gets off the ground.

Super Mario Odyssey's main gimmick is "Cappy", a sentient hat that you throw at enemies to possess them and gain their powers to progress and find collectibles. That's sick! And the game has beautiful creative syntax - it's able to use hats and headwear (or the lack thereof) to communicate to the player that an enemy can or can not be commandeered without ever saying a word, it's a hilarious and charming leitmotif that's used really well throughout the game.

The problem is that the charm of these possession power-ups wears off quickly for me. They more often than not have one button or one "thing" that they do, understandable since there's so many of them that the designers have had to implement but maybe that's an argument against the game spreading itself so thin? Because instead of using Mario's new, exciting and more-comprehensive-than-ever platforming moveset to traverse the worlds, you spend a lot of this game trudging across flat levels to possess a guy, do that one thing that guy you just possessed can do to solve a menial puzzle, get a collectible and move on to the next one.

Mario feels better than ever to control, likely even better than Super Mario Sunshine - which in my mind was the previous benchmark for Mario's sense of control. But the difference is that in Sunshine, a lot of the levels are designed to accommodate for platforming. So many of that game's early levels are built like jungle gyms, just ready for you to jump and climb all over. Bianco Hills, Ricco Harbour, Pinna Park etc.

Mario Odyssey has New Donk City as an excellent example of this kind of design...And not much else. The Sand Kingdom teases you with this huge, climbing frame-like tower right in the centre that you traverse to get a collectible in the game's main story. There are so many levels and layers to this tower, it's really cool to navigate in whatever way you want. In my mind, the game peaks here, and then it never does this again. If all of Mario Odyssey was like this one bit in the Sand Kingdom, it might be one of my favourite games of all time! But the rest of the Sand Kingdom is flat, largely empty dunes. The Seaside Kingdom is largely flat. The Lakeside Kingdom is almost entirely underwater. The Snow Kingdom is basically just a racetrack. Isn't this supposed to be a platformer? All of the levels have to be designed to house things only accessible with Mario's various gimmicks to the point where the kind of cool, tricky, expressive platforming Mario Sunshine had you doing is hardly ever necessitated, even with Mario's pimped out moveset.

This is all compounded by the nature of the game's main collectible, the Power Moons. It's sad to say that I don't like the Power Moons because I feel like they were a direct response to a common complaint about Mario Sunshine and Galaxy - that being that gathering the main collectible boots you out of the level and disincentives you from exploring and learning the layout. It's cool that this is no longer the case, but this also means that Power Moons are everywhere and often completely trivial and underwhelming to collect. If you're not finding one via silly one-dimensional possession gimmick, you're getting one through some other form of filler busywork. There's a few Power Moons that are obtained through platforming challenges, but there's a lot more that are found through doing random, unfun bullshit. Sliding block puzzles, ground-pounding shining spots, fishing "minigames", RUNNING IN A CIRCLE.

It's just unfocused like I say. The game stuffs so many ideas into one place that it's constantly having to compromise your fun so that you can experience all of them. All the pieces are there for a super imaginative, fun and original platformer. I really love a lot of the ideas Super Mario Odyssey has and a lot of the things it represents, but I think it gets crushed under the weight of its own ambition and the gameplay itself ends up being far more of a slog than its individual parts would suggest. It's not a bad game at all, in a lot of ways it's objectively good! Its quality is so visible in so many areas, but when you look at just how gimmicky it is, it becomes absolutely no surprise that a game like Balan Wonderworld - which tried so hard to follow in its footsteps, was an abject failure. This is a game that is less than the sum of its parts.