One of my favourite franchises of all time, but I really don’t like its debut game.

Thanks to the flat tracks, and extreme lack of track variety (every single theme except Rainbow Road shows up multiple times) The levels have no identity. They all just kind of blend together into one big, boring track.

The lack of interesting tracks has gone on to pollute the newer games too thanks to retro tracks. Even Mario Kart 8 with its extra effort into updating retro tracks can’t save generic Mario Circuit track #50

The AI blatantly cheat too. I don't just mean typical rubber banding; I've seen AI just straight up drive through a wall of Whomps like they weren't even there. They will magically jump over any items in their path, almost as if using a feather, however they're definitely not using a feather, and I know that for two reasons: One is that I've seen them do it while holding another item at the time, but also because each AI can only use 1 item each.

Speaking of which, the item system is super wack in this game. AI don't need item boxes, they can just spawn items randomly, but as I said they are limited to one per character. Some of them have unique items, like Toad has poison mushrooms, Bowser has fire balls and Yoshi has a Yoshi Egg, but then some of them just get generic items, like Donkey Kong gets a banana. The inconsistency is just weird, but regardless, having the characters spam items at you, or get infinite star power is annoying.

A huge part of the screen is taken up by a map of the track, or a rear view mirror depending on your choice. It's like someone in Nintendo went back in time and thought they were working on a DS game. It makes the actual racing screen look squashed and it's just distracting.

Controls are too slippery. I found drifting is next to useless except on super wide turns with a lot of space thanks to how they handle.

The game sucks. Boring tracks, terrible physics, cheating AI, weird item balance... It looks kind of nice, but that's about it.

Extremely good idea of what Pokémon can and should be. Solving issues from Diamond and Pearl, like lack of Pokémon variety and slow gameplay speeds, Platinum also offers a sweet spot of difficulty for a Pokémon game.

Sinnoh offers a great region to roam around, filled with all kinds of different areas and terrain. All kinds of things to find and unlock. It also has a really good soundtrack.

My main issue with the game is the sheer amount of HMs. You need about 5 of them just to get through Victory Road and Mount Coronet alone. I found myself having to carry a HM slave with me far too often, or giving crappy moves like Rock Smash to a main team member.

There's also a lot of backtracking involved every time you get a HM. The game gets credit for having so much to explore, but if you play like I do, then everytime new things open up you have to check them out, meaning for each new HM I tended to spend a lot of time putting the story on hold to revisit old areas.

Pretty much the ultimate love letter to any Dragon Ball fan. Featuring a massive cast of characters - even more than any game in the franchise up to this day (except maybe Xenoverse 2 with all its DLC), equally impressive amount of stages and more fanservice than you can shake a stick at.

Unlike a lot of Dragon Ball games this one doesn't just focus on Z and some movies. EVERYTHING from the series at the time is here. Even the original Dragon Ball gets a hefty amount of characters and stages. Even Arale is in this game.

It's not all balanced equally. If you wanted a competitive fighting game, this isn't that. This is a game where characters on the weaker end in the series are equally as weak here. Of course it's set up so you can technically win with anyone (except maybe Mr Satan...) but you'll be doing less damage and taking more playing as Chaozu, or making much slower and easier to counter moves as a giant character.

The lack of focus on any one series does show up in the story mode. In order to fit DB, Z, GT, Movies and even what if battles, stories jump around rapidly. For example we go from Majin Vegeta vs Fat Boo straight to Vegetto vs Boohan. It's a bit weird, and doesn't always make sense with the fights they chose, but the game seemed focused on showing off the sheer amount of scope it has, rather than trying to put the player through the same Raditz-Boo story as most DB games do.

The battles in story mode set themselves apart from regular battles greatly. The team system allows fights like everyone vs Nappa to happen in a single unbroken fight, with characters switching in and out on a button prompt after a certain time has passed, or you've dealt enough damage. Scripted events like beam struggles happen automatically. It's all just great.

Mission 100 provides, as you might expect, 100 event battles, with each enemy team focusing on a theme, like female fighters, Super Saiyans, sword users etc. The last few pages of these are basically boss fights with a single character with buffed up stats. The last of these, SSj4 Gogeta, is the hardest battle in the game and provides a fitting final boss.

Another great example of how much content this game has is the tournaments. The game has 5 different tournament modes, each with its own gimmick based off the series (the regular WT has ring outs, the Cell Games uses a stamina based system, like how Cell intended it to be, and the Yamcha tournament, fitting as it is the most random inclusion due to not being based on a real tournament, makes you use a random character).

My main complaint with the game would probably be the DB collecting. There's only two ways to get dragon balls - either luck out and get one as a prize for winning the tournament via RNG, or play a story mission and break buildings and hope to get one through RNG. So you won't be able to find them during the huge grind through mission 100, and considering you need to summon the dragon many times to get everything in the game, having to grind out getting them through the same story mission over and over is a chore.

Mostly though this game is just an amazing toy for DB fans. It's not balanced, but it has so much content and so many details for DB fans (Saiyan characters that can turn great ape cannot do so unless they are on a night stage, except those that can create an artificial moon like Vegeta), that it remains one of, if not my favourite DB game.

A great way to celebrate Sonic's history. While I do prefer the Adventure-style controls for 3D Sonic, the boost playstyle definitely leads itself to a ton of amazing set pieces. Unfortunately trying to do any kind of platforming as 3D Sonic feels clunky as hell. At least while the camera is behind him, the side-scrolling parts aren't too bad.

The 2D Sonic in this game may not quite feel as good as he has in the past, or in Sonic Mania, but it's pretty close, and I personally prefer the art style for his stages here over the more cartoony ones used in his solo games. The stages look so detailed and much more alive. 2D Sonic definitely benefits from using 3D Sonic's stage designs.

So while I can't say this is the "best of both worlds", I do find both of them to be incredibly fun.

Playing through classic stages as 3D Sonic, or newer stages as 2D Sonic was such a great mix of nostalgia and brand new experiences.

The game is unfortunately pretty short, with only 9 main levels. The themes also feel lacking, with 4 out of those 9 being city stages. Luckily they do all have their own unique personality, with the only two feeling too similar (at least aesthetically) are City Escape and Rooftop Run.

The game pads out a lot of extra content with optional challenges. These vary massively in terms of uniqueness and enjoyability, but overall I found them to be a very positive experience for the game, and allowed some mini games that wouldn't have fit in the main stages. It also allowed Sonic's friends to show off their own individual characteristics without getting too overbearing.

The story is overly simple, which isn't too much of a problem, but the cutscenes still manage to feel cheesy as all hell. I'd almost prefer them to just not be there if they're going to put so little effort into it.

I struggled to decide if I should give it a 7 or an 8, but I think a weak 8 is deserving as even with its lack of stages, it had enough extra content to keep me playing for a while, and most of the stages were so fun and had so many paths that I didn't mind replaying them so many times. Except Planet Wisp Act 1, which is both way too long and has a horrible gimmick.

It’s pretty weird that this is considered a Super Mario game – a direct sequel to Super Mario World no less. There’s a reason Yoshi got his own series after this, since this gameplay is so different from typical Mario gameplay. I can appreciate the style it’s got going for it, the slower paced, ammo-conscious gameplay can be fun, if a bit frustrating. And baby Mario can feel too much like a burden at times. Overall, even if I don’t like the gameplay as much as usual Mario, it’s a charming game and has a soundtrack to match.

My main problem with the game is the collectables/score system. In order to unlock the hidden levels you need to get a perfect score on all stages, and that's fair. But getting that score is too much of a burden for me, since it requires 25 different collectable items in each stage AND max health (the collectables don't save either, it all has to be done in one run). This isn't a problem, there's plenty of games that I don't feel like fully completing, but Yoshi's island gives you no reason to collect ANYTHING if you’re not going for full score. It's an all or nothing kind of game. Either you go for a full score, or you ignore everything and just blast through the level. The issue with that is many levels can feel empty as a result. Like maybe the exit is just a straight line, and the game expects you to check the different elevations and hidden passageways to get everything, but if you don’t intend to go for 100% there’s little to no reason to go anywhere but straight forward.

I do like the levels for the most part. The game has a ton of unique enemy types and platforming gimmicks. However I disliked almost all of the underground, and sometimes castle stages. The maze-like structure just didn’t do it for me, along with the lack of visual variety.

The game is fine, the visuals are bright and colourful, it controls very well and the boss fights are all creative, albeit very easy. But once I had made the decision to not bother with the effort to get full points, the game started to feel hollow.

A truly beautiful looking game. The world is such a great sight, which is lucky since you'll be riding through the same spots over and over. The soundtrack also surprised me with just how good it can get. It's packed full of content, and the world seems to react and evolve to your actions seamlessly.

But the game just feels so slow. I don't mean the pacing, I mean every little thing. Every small action will require you to do something that would otherwise be automatic for user experience purposes in other games. And then there's the amount of times the game forces you to go at its pace rather than your own. Sooooo many missions start out with "Follow X character to X location" where you have to go at a snails pace while listening to the dialogue. It's like the game is full of hidden cutscenes that disguise themselves as gameplay.

The game practically needs to be carried by its story. Luckily the story IS great, with equally well written characters, and if it wasn’t for the heavy flaws dragging it down, the game could have been amazing. But as it is it just kind of annoyed me how often Rockstar seemed to think “This story is so unbelievably amazing that the player won’t mind hundreds of hours of slow progress to hear it all!”

This disguised gameplay can go way too far sometimes. Like it's one thing to make you personally travel to each location while listening to dialogue instead of just achieving the exact same purpose in a full cutscene, but there's a couple of times when you're watching an actual cutscene then all of a sudden you get a prompt to push the analogue stick to move forward. I just don't get it, the game desperately tries to force interaction into it in order to hide the fact there's so much story to get through.

The game also suffers from a lot of Rockstar's typical problems. Clunky controls, glitchy interactions (have fun trying to reposition yourself a few inchs constantly to get a certain prompt to light up). A couple of times I tried to run up to my horse and jump on top of it, only to accidentally tackle a poor bystander to the ground because it's attached to the exact same button. Speaking of which, it is way too easy to lose honor in this game. Randomly bumping into someone, which will happen a lot due to the horrible controls, can cause them to get angry and attack you, but if you dare defend yourself you lose honor and get a bounty on you.

It takes realism too far and suffers from it. For example, when you get sick health restoring items just stop working. That might not be too bad if it was a balancing effect from another thing (like maybe an alcoholic drink that raises your stats), but getting sick is a story forced plot point.

Want to loot a bunch of dead victims after a huge shoot out? Be prepared for your mission allies to coooonstantly scream at you to hurry up.

The world is full of stuff to do at least. I think that sometimes it's a bit too much of a chore though. Early on I did a mission that involved getting perfect carcasses of certain animals. You'd think that the sections on the map that have those animals drawn on them would spawn a lot of them, but it could take me 30 minutes to find a rabbit in a rabbit-marked area. Trying to catch a legendary fish could take 10 minutes of constantly rotating the analogue stick. Treasure maps are so vague they're unreadable most of the time. It's weird because when you're in a mission the game gives you plenty of info and direction, but anything outside of a mission and you're on your own with little to no hints, like if a camp friend wants an item. You have no idea where it is, the game doesn't tell you where it is. I guess the point is that, if you're not looking it up online, you're supposed to just be happy exploring and finding what you find free roam, but after I did a lot of them early-game, I found I was wasting so much time that by chapter 3 of the game I was just travelling from mission to mission, the idea of wasting time exploring every nook and cranny in such a huge world, with stiff controls, was daunting.

It's definitely not a bad game. Not at all. It has the story, it has the music, it has the characters, it has the level of depth, it has the gun mechanics (although I wouldn't mind those being a bit better due to the sheer amount of endless shoot outs you're forced in to). It just lacks a bit of polish and smoothing down, and to realise when realism becomes a chore.

Never played the original, so this is like a brand new game to me.

This game oozes personality. The stages are beautifully done, letting you feel like you're actually racing in these unique themed areas, rather than just a generic racetrack with a themed backdrop. The roster is varied and full of life.

The customisation stuff really adds life to everything, I especially love that the legendary skins give new podium animations (another little addition that adds to the games charm).

This game is well known for its pretty big skill gap compared to other kart racers. While I can respect that, I found that it clashed too much with the mechanics that still make this game, well, a kart racer. The constant item spam is still a thing, so the idea of thinking of this as competitive flies in your face (literally) when you get hit by 10 items in a row.

The drifting mechanic never felt good to me even after I got used to it. The amount on focus needed on it all race makes it feel less fun and more stressful to get the perfect timing constantly, forcing me to ignore the gorgeous levels. The drifting itself felt off to me, with the little jump needed to be done before drifting, so the timing was often off, I'd drift too late, turn too early throwing my angle off, or I'd turn too late after I landed and not end up drifting at all. There were certain times I wasn't even sure if I had managed to hit the drift, because the feedback for doing so is pretty subtle.

Single player mode is fine despite its simple plot, it's got some cutscenes that are fun. It's super short though, so they pad this out by making you do every track 4 times for 100% (6 times if the track is a boss race track!).

Online is bare bones as all heck. There's no kind of ranking or rating system, so every race is basically just a one-off and you move to the next one, never feeling like you're earning anything. The race also ends 20 seconds after first place crosses the finish line, and thanks to the immense skill gap this game has, a player in first can easily finish 30+ seconds ahead of everyone else, especially since the items in this game aren't great for catching up to anyone too far ahead. But if you're in the back with the others then the items will only make sure the person in first just gets a bigger and bigger lead.

An overall fun kart racer, but once you've done the short story, unless you really want to master this game via the time trial ghosts and relics, and are content playing single races online, there's not much to keep you drawn in.