Look, the moment-to-moment experience of playing Sonic Frontiers is pretty fucked. You'll be fighting a camera which is designed to inconvenience you and swing around wildly at all times, you'll get locked onto mini obstacle courses when they pop in a meter ahead of you and not being able to return back to moving about the open world until you hop through a bunch of boost rings that shoot you in the opposite direction you want to move, and you'll deal with ever-changing controls as the camera state and context collaborate to make sure whatever you intended to do becomes something else. It's a mess that is pretty much impossible for me to look past.

But I can't really bring myself to dislike it. Despite the fact that it's barely functional and any emotional moment has to be surrounded by smirks and 5 of the weakest quips you've ever heard lest it come off as too sincere, the glitchy somber Digimon-movie aesthetic, tons of Cute Little Guys all over the place, and next-level tunes (outside of the boss fights...) make for something I ultimately still enjoyed a reasonable amount and don't regret giving my time. Frontiers is bold and deeply weird, and I'm always down for that.

>be game dev
>three factions
>"oh, it's obvious who"
>taliban
>china
>america

This game is not the best, but very funny and enjoyable if you just want some dumb fun.

Pretty cool game! The challenges are piss easy for the most part, but the games here are really cool and fun! I love Haggleman and the development of that series as it goes along, it really feels like it’s own weird thing that would’ve come out back then rather than an imitation of something else. Most of these have their own personality that separates them from their NES inspirations, actually, apart from the Galaga clone that kicks the game off. The small-scale but still rather meaty RPG was a very pleasant surprise, even if it comes with all the QoL gripes that are typical of RPGs from the era it’s imitating.

While I like all the games here, and think the metagame surrounding them adds a lot of charm to the experience, I can’t help feeling like this format, the way it depicts playing a video game inside a video game had the potential to be something seriously amazing with a bit more narrative meat. I love the glimpses of world building you get, the peeks into the dev studios and culture surrounding this alternate history version of the 8 bit era, and I would’ve adored to see that fleshed out more, maybe through talks of studio rivalries or personal touches from the in universe developers to be found within the games themselves.

At that point, though, maybe I’m asking a bit much from a DS game based on a game show I’ve never watched! I think the fact that it got my imagination running like that is a sign that it’s a worthwhile time though, and one I had a lot of fun with.

I am a sucker for simplicity. Something similar to the concept of the "narcissism of small differences", but I'm not sure of the best phrase for this (I'm sure there is one but I can't tell you what it is, yet), where as it is the small differences between two otherwise identical things that make them matter the most.

The Humans and Orcs are essentially identical 1/1 clones of each other at the most base level (pre-upgrades). A Grunt is the same as a Footman. An Axethrower and an Archer are identical, etc.
This brings gameplay down to micromanagement and knowing which upgrades make the most sense to do first.
This is not the best RTS game, but it is one of my favorites for this.


*Note : At higher level of play, I suppose it can be argued Orc are the "objectively better race", but I'm not playing at a level, I'm playing with friends and against AI.

While conceptually very cool and initially plenty engaging, the rolls are tuned extremely poorly to the point where it no longer feels like tactical prowess is the primary factor...you've just got to hope you get a string of 3 players failing to pick up the ball rather than 6.

Management of and accounting for RNG is a skill, but it has its limits. I don't doubt that the better player will usually win, but the relationship between those two things feels far too loose to keep up the fantasy of a master tactician. Oh, and the Warhammer setting is as drainingly cynical as ever.