Systematic Genocide Simulator, brought to you by Nintendo. Complete with jump scares, labyrinthian and borderline non-euclidean oppressive spaces to stumble through, bizarre and uncomfortable musical choices, a camera that manages to convey uneasy claustrophobia in a 1991 handheld game, and an ending that gives you the very companion that you set out to kill and makes you contemplate your actions through 5 minutes of uneventful walking set to melancholic yet vaguely friendly music as you realize you're the monster. How did this get made?

It's easy to put this game along with "meme games" that are plaguing Steam for a long time such as Hentai [put whatever you want], especially that it's similar in a couple of ways - this is a cheap, cheaply looking, clickbaity game. After all, this is a game where Sakuya Izakoi from Touhou Project series dabs! Just like meme games, it also has reachability a lot of games could just dream about.

But where's meme games are nothing more than a bunch of overused reddit, welp, memes (along with some stolen/default assets and bad quality pornography), Sakuya Izayoi Gives You Advice And Dabs feels like it has pure (heh) heart. This game wants to help you quite literally - asking you what's wrong, giving you a advice for that problem and wanting you to come back when you will need another one. And although 10 different tips doesn't feel like much, it's enough to be helpful. It also has hand-drawn art which, although not the best looking, fits well into this game.

Overall, is it that great? Probably not, but i wish more games were like this. Especially meme games.

Oh and also you won't believe what she does at the end, it's amazing.

Chunithm is an absolute banger, and it being Japan-only is criminal.
I love music games. They're simple and clean and the way that they make you feel is: good. Mastery of a rhythm game is like nothing else, even the pros of, like, Counter Strike or whatever could never hope to be as spectacularly entertaining as a difficulty 13 Voltex player. But they're also welcoming and warm - fighting games can be similarly impressive to view, but without fail they have some kind of wall. In music games, the practice gradient is smooth, and with enough time and effort anyone can be playing Master tracks.

I played Chuni for the first time on the third floor of Sega 2 in Akihabara. I fell in love with it immediately - how could I not, with Scatman John on the tracklist.
Since then, I've learnt how to work a 3d printer, developed soldering and electronics skills, and built my own con (twice over) to play Chuni at home (shh nobody tell sega). It's worth the investment, because every new map is a joy, and perfecting stuff you've played a thousand times feels like smashing Ornstein and Smough into the dirt every time. Chunithm has brought me new hobbies, new skills, new tastes in music, and on top of that, it's just a whole lot of fun. Thanks, Chunithm. Thunithm.

I don't think there's a shooter in existence with more heart and genuine love for the craft than there is this one, other than maybe Fall of Cybertron.

What's here is the most perfect encapsulation of the transformers space war cacophony energy. Through the whole ride you hear all the sounds and technological noise of the mechanical universe, watching as every enemy and friend alike have constantly moving shifting parts to bring home the alive machinery they are. Guns each match the aesthetic beautifully, making the widest and loudest firefights all the more real. The adventure itself, while stumbling over itself in some repetition, manages to craft stunning vistas and warzones to see from start to end.

And on top of all that, it's a solid third person shooter in its own right. Enemy design is quite differentiated and constantly dodging your shots and repositioning. Nothing particularly exemplary in AI or particular designs but not frustratingly stupid either. Arenas themselves encourage you to be form changing and keeping your movement alive, with the flying segments especially allowing you to gun it to the other side of the fight before form changing back to shotgun an enemy close up. Really the only startling problem with War for Cybertron's levels is that you'll have seen everything about 'twice' in terms of encounter design because they didn't reallyyy have enough to last 8 non-boss missions as much as they had 4-5. The boss designs themselves are rather tedious but do deserve a star for at least forcing you to be moving nonstop. Final boss of the autobot campaign especially was so starkingly punishing if you weren't getting your shit together.

A heavy shoutout to the multiplayer too. All of the systems here have more than enough justification to be a fucking amazing arena combat pvp, but unfortunately what's left after the servers being shot down are the mod community's defiance custom games. I haven't been able to experience that part myself yet, but from the videos I've poured through it's definitely a time I wish I could be having right now.

While I wouldn't say it's one of the greatest ventures, the first two hours of me going apeshit at how realized the world was when doing the first two missions is something that I do want everyone to experience. And the potential here is certainly something that, I imagine, Fall of Cybertron lands better.

It's weird. I wasn't really expecting a Resident Evil game of all things to get me teary-eyed.

There's a lot of things about the game in general that are a weird intricate combination though. It's oozing with blood from RE4 despite being nowhere even close to that game with 8's current gameplay of keep-stepping-back-and-shoot. It has Silent Hill vibes that eclipses any scares in every other RE game with the dollhouse. Iconography of the series is embroiled in, culminating in a particular 'hype' scene that while nowhere near earned, directly references the action side of 5 and 6 in one extended sequence. A theme park ride and attractions is what I've constantly had the game called around me, but that's really selling it short. They're practically full on Zelda dungeons that you go to between the overworld, each of them tying neatly to the setting and tension and never missing a beat.

And overall it's just grand! A celebratory but earnest almost standalone piece in its own right. Its heart is so strong that thinking of the game now I can only see it retrospectively as an emotional journey about and surrounding Ethan and about family, despite how really the general structure of the narrative only has that come in less subtly in the last quarter, and how it is extraordinarily goofy and far less grounded than 7 was.

Yet I don't think I would have it any other way. I imagine that in time I might even call it one of my favorite games, despite me not really even being attached much to the RE series in general. I'm excited for what the year will bring when stuff like this manages to land familiar punches with meatier landings than anything else of its ilk.

degenerate fighting game hiding behind illusory veil of 'honor' and 'fundamentals'; in other words, it's essentially perfect. love literally everything about this. haohmaru's heavy slash is the greatest fighting game button of all time. if samurai shodown 2019 had rollback netcode it'd probably be more of a 'forever' fighting game for me but it cant possibly match the lunacy of v special. go ahead, tell me what the D button does. you cant because its a fickle mistress that exists beyond the realm of logic

Now that time's passed enough I feel more confident talking about this expansion. When I first played it, I dropped it about 2/3 in. I was tired, disappointed, thoroughly washed out of attempting to get into Destiny 2 in any regard. There's a lot to that, combination of feelings of Forsaken being good (but not like, that good. It's weird how venerated it gets but maybe when it's your only piece of good content that's just how it goes), surrounded by friends who were FOMO on Shadowkeep's launch culture, who could never stop talking about how awesome it is. I ended up getting it right before Beyond Light was launching, sort of trying to catch up.

The first mission was a solid tonesetter, getting a bit of my intrigue with some of the imagery and looking visually splendent. I was excited, there was a feeling that they really had found their place with Forsaken and knew what they were doing.

That was wrong. So utterly wrong. The remaining 80% of Shadowkeep is grinding, a strike, grinding, overworld boss bullshit, grinding, a final level mission and a boss. Nothing happens to the story, and pacing is at an all time low again. It reminds me strongly of Year 1 content, but worse personally in that Shadowkeep genuinely feels like it has an idea behind it, unlike those expacs. It drowns itself in familiar imagery of the series, fanservicing alongside its slew of pointless gather a bunch of dead enemies so you can unlock the path forward. So I walked away so defeated, so utterly demolished that I could trust the Destiny 2 community or the friends who tried to get me into this game. They're still my friends mind, but it was not a good feeling at all to feel genuinely gaslit about things about Shadowkeep that weren't actually there (and really, they did lie about some shit I have a grudge about).

Ultimately, over the year following I did actually end up doing the garden of salvation raid and finishing the campaign. The latter honestly wasn't worth it, but the raid was fun. It balances a lot of artistic splendor in its environments while juggling enough good encounters. It's no Last Wish in terms of mechanical difficulty or however many mechanics you're ending up balancing, but it's better telegraphed (other than really one encounter) than most of the raids and it ended up being one I rather enjoyed.

But it's not my selling point for shadowkeep, even on the deep sale it's currently at by the time of writing. I'm hoping with my heart that Bungie finds some sort of footing, or maybe in 3-4 years it has a FF14 style "you have to play this game just for this" expac. I do not think anything here implies that the life on D2's staff is utterly soulless, or that the quality of their work ethic for this game has dropped. If anything they've gotten better with their community and on top of things schedule wise as a whole, it's just that most of the content is deeply not for me and/or awful garbage.

If you do find yourself pushed into playing D2, skip this one. Forsaken is no golden king but it is certainly the best they've got right now and it's not worth putting faith into until they give genuine returns.

I want to preface that all of this may sound very unfair and nitpicky but please let me be flippant, this game is naff. Farming is a game genre that, much like the real-world application, is essentially all about math. I never did homework at school, and I don’t plan to start in my mid-twenties. https://i.imgur.com/P28ClZe.png
Hundred Days is the first victim of my Post-Sakuna: Of Rice & Ruin depression. Sakuna singlehandedly revitalised my interest in the farming genre because it was absolutely radiating in a level of reverence for its chosen craft that I’d otherwise never seen in a game of its kind. It took great strides to make sure that not only does the player have to partake in every step in the ricemaking process by hand, it also hid away much of the controllable and uncontrollable variables that contribute to the quality of the harvest until you finally hit that year-end stat page. It forced me to have a steady hand, examine my environment carefully and learn which cues require which actions to counteract. After handing the player a new tool, it took the time to explain their importance in the overall process, as well as a little of their history; each cog in the cultivation machine is shown to be as important as the other. Greedily, I think I NEEDED all of this to care.

I was hopeful about Hundred Days because it focuses entirely around the art and business of winemaking, to a level seemingly more detailed than Sakuna! The problem is that the very distinct dropoff in reverence to the craft almost hit me like a wet sponge - I’m willing to believe that the developers crafted this game out of genuine interest and passion for winemaking, but absolutely none of that verve made it to the final cut. You’re looking at your vineyard empire from a hot air balloon that only seems to become more distant as your empire expands. The higher up my perspective and scale of my empire got, the less the details mattered, beautiful fields of grapevines slowly camouflaging themselves into mere data points on a spreadsheet. The tutorialisation is as shoddy as the story, I barely knew how to navigate the UI, how to find all of the upgrades let alone know what each of them even did. Many of which are insanely expensive, so you just need to grind away to receive incremental boosts to production. Everything you can click on just brings up a new window filled with fucking numbers and percentages. Fun stuff man. Go outside and touch rice.

The rub is that the game starts with a Stardew Valley-esque “boring office life” introductory sequence, used to introduce the player to the basics of the core gameplay loop. Basically, placing cards with specific functions down onto your field grid. It then sends you to your winemaker’s paradise, an idyllic vineyard somewhere in the Tuscany hills or whatever, before making you do the exact same card-based grind. Guess the message here is that even your life’s dream can become a desk job if you aren't willing to give it some respect.

Right off the bat, I must point out this game's biggest flaw: its pricing. One Famicom Detective Club (FDC) game is $35, or £50/$60 for both, and in Europe you cannot buy them separately. For a remake of a Famicom adventure game/visual novel that took me under six hours to complete with virtually zero replayability, this pricing is just unacceptable, and I can't recommend this game to anyone if the price stays this way.

Nevertheless, The Girl Who Stands Behind is pretty good. The best point of comparison I can make is that it feels like a long and loose Ace Attorney case, the ones that have nothing to do with any overarching plots. There is almost nothing in terms of character building for the protagonist, and the little that was there felt shoehorned in. This is the second FDC game, which I played first by recommendation of the one review that I read before buying, meaning that there might be better foundations laid out in the The Missing Heir, but I wouldn't count on it. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, since the game was intent on feeling like a one-off episode, and it executed that well.

The story was intriguing, and it had enough twists and turns to keep me guessing for the almost one sitting I played it in. It’s about a dead high school girl and a rumour about a ghost in said school, with a more serious tone than the light-hearted Ace Attorney series. I was promised a bit of horror by that one review I read, but it didn’t really deliver until the very end, and even then, it was very tame. It’s very linear, meaning that you won’t have to piece together the puzzle yourself, but the game does a good job of addressing deductions the player might have made, eliminating most of the annoying dramatic irony that comes with detective media like this.

In terms of its success as a remake, it’s excellent from a presentation standpoint. The new art direction is great, with a fair amount of charm that complements the story well. The characters are expressive, and the backgrounds are intricate. I’m told that it’s even prettier in the first game, which is set in the countryside, where this one is in the city. It’s fully animated and voice acted too, making it feel like a step above something like the older Ace Attorney games. The rearranged music was surprisingly nice, with options for the Famicom versions too if you want a more authentic experience.

FDC’s remade presentation brushed up well, but what doesn’t hold up so well today is the adventure gameplay. One of the reasons I played this one first was because I was told its gameplay is less obtuse than the first game, and if this is “less obtuse” I shudder to think about what The Missing Heir is like. You have to pixel peep for the inanest things. You have to exhaust every dialogue option for a character multiple times even if their only response is “…”. It’s just not elegant in the slightest, and even though I got through it easy enough, I found myself eyerolling at some of the ways to progress. It’s a shame that the gameplay was largely untouched considering the effort that went into remaking the presentation.

Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind is well done remake and a fantastic homage to detective media that fans of Ace Attorney will enjoy, although you’ll need to have some patience for its outdated gameplay. Like I said before though, I can’t recommend that anyone buys this until the price has been slashed by at least 50%, or you’ll come away from its short runtime feeling very unsatisfied. That being said, it’s time for me to go buy and play The Missing Heir.

There's a moment at the end of world 2 where a cutscene plays, with the whole crew in a desert as Kirby lags behind, desperate for food as they then imagine their friends as said items. Of course, Adeleine makes food for everyone with her paintings and they have a nice picnic right there.

It's that kind of heartwarming, powerful energy that runs through the whole experience. This friendly, childlike pleasantry as you go across the galaxy with fun poplike music playing through the speakers, as your friends join you in a great amount of the levels to assist you. Whether that be sledding with waddle dee to king dedede himself helping you across lava chasms there's always a strong aura that feels like one very warm hug. If anything the only small issue is just that sometimes the game reminds you that it's a little old and shakes your attention by forcing you to grab a powerup twice from a completely different area for the true ending. But even still, the whole playthrough is rather forgiving, in that you can actually get a powerup mid-level, quit out of the level, and still have that powerup on you, including all the crystals you got in the level so far!!

Crystal Shards is very much a nostalgic, but also genuine fav of the kirby games for me. I'll always think about that final level where The Squad helps you out one final time before Ribbon carries you as you rail shoot an utterly corrupted angelic entity that bleeds while the game pleads with you to Tough It Out!!!

I have a certain level of apprehension about airing my RE takes. Not only do I adore 6 as a madde gonzo fast & furious co-op xperience with movement options the likes of which I’ve never seen..... I've also never played RE4. There's always going to be someone unfavourably comparing any given RE to that one, and it makes me feel wholly unqualified! The basic throughline is that I've essentially liked to adored every title I've played so far;-

...except 7. A dull as dishwater and largely homogenous Outlast-like that, the second it runs dry of horror juices, leaves you with Only Serviceable combat to tide you over for the game's astoundingly creatively barren final third. I was a little displeased to see that 8 would follow the same trajectory, acting as the next step in a kind of “third trilogy” for the RE mainline.

RE8, thankfully, kind of slaps. A virtual ticket to a Tim Burton theme park (sorry for the tired analogy, but it’s the right one) where every ride strives to do something drastically different from the last. A venturesome monolith of genre and series love letters that begs to be explored and interfaced with. I found it impossible to grow weary of the combat when the game reinvented the wheel often enough for tense resource manage-y hostile encounters to end up feeling like returning to a warm blanket. I loved the experience so much that I explored every inch of the map, collecting whatever I could find, solving environmental puzzles and fighting optional bosses for the sheer joy of it. I can’t stress enough how happy I am to have had the exact opposite experience to my playthrough of 7 that I essentially wanted to be over as quickly as possible.

Adored the four lords, the way each of their areas felt like entirely different servings from a Dread X Collection but polished to a mirror shine with some of the best art and technical direction I’ve seen from a Capcom title in years. Mob Psycho Walter White. The journey of RE8 gains momentum towards the end as your arsenal is as kitted-out as possible, and it almost smacks of Lost Planet 2 at points. Also the final boss is probably the most stunningly animated thing I've ever seen in a game. King shit!!!!!!

With talk of theme park ride games as of late, it's a great timing that of all the games I am the most excited to play, that I finally get working for me to play, it's this one. Quite literally a christian apocrypha story made manifest into powerful rainbow atmospheric audiovisual pleasure, never really missing a cohesive beat from vista to vista.

And also difficult to gush over in the same light, as pretty much every screenshot is a painting in its own justice, and is pretty much the entire appeal. The story and combat, while supportive and have honestly great bedrock foundation, are treated in a rather ancillary fashion in comparison. Really the game could've done with less of the combat, or at least refine the systems to better match the experience as a whole (more like Chapter 6, which literally does this, or modify the weapons for different modes in general!) because otherwise there's far too many of the same encounter that brings a good amount of it down. The ending itself is also rather anticlimactic, albeit sensible for the structure of where things were going. Hell, you could argue that it ending on a rather softer note makes sense for it, and tbh I'm also willing to take it simply because it implies that the queer relationship between these two lovebirds is far more important than one fallen angel :3. Even still, I felt a rather strong wanting for it to go full Bayonetta/TW101 finale with it. But honestly a lot of this was probably a budgetary issue, which makes the end experience all the more dumbfounding.

I also chose this after re-evaluating my principles and understandings of why I love the things I do, and what I pursue. And El Shaddai definitely offered me a strong, wide-eyed grin the whole way through, to affirm that yeah, video games are p cool actually.