I think going for 100% completion on a first playthrough might've soured my thoughts just a smidge; this is easily the most cruel out of all the Metroid games (maybe besides the Prime games) when it comes to item completion because every other pickup is some kind of extreme shinespark puzzle. It was fun at first and it makes incredibly clever use of the mechanic, but I wish there was more variety in how items were hidden.

The EMMI also start out fantastic and keep you on your toes, but there's a point where they start to become less terrifying and more tedious instead. I really wish there was more the player could do to go up against the EMMI when they're caught instead of essentially a guaranteed instant game over; maybe making the timing window more forgiving but adding more significant consequences for breaking free would've been more interesting. Despite that, Dread is outstanding in every other regard and is a true return to form for the series. It's everything I could've asked for more than two decades ago and lives up to every expectation.

(Played the PS4 Legendary Edition on PS5)

This is still one of my favorite games ever, even if this most recent playthrough has started to give way to cracks I hadn't noticed before. The way the story tries to excuse working together with Cerberus is flimsy at best and downright baffling at worst, and when looking at the trilogy as a whole, ME2 stands out as the black sheep because it really doesn't do too much in progressing the overarching plot.

But I don't really care about any of that because ME2 nails its character writing, and it works because the game fully knows it and owns it. This has the largest main cast out of the three games, and it spends the majority of its playtime on developing those characters and letting you spend time with all of them. The only real duds in the cast are the DLC characters due to being shoved in after the game was already finished (and the clear lack of budget and development time for them), and Jacob who while gets an interesting background with his father, suffers from a personality that's more bland than even the worst ME1 had to offer. But everyone else? I love them all, and I'm still incredibly giddy about getting to ME2 whenever I inevitably start new runs of the trilogy.

Vastly surpassed my expectations much to my surprise, especially after how lackluster the initial reveal and gameplay was when this was announced at E3. The character writing is outstanding, even if a little bit too much and in your face initially for the first two hours or so. I'd actually dare say that this is my favorite rendition of the Guardians, even more than the MCU movies.

It's a game that deals with how people deal with personal trauma and history, and how to move past it, which was something I never expected from a Marvel game, let alone Guardians of the Galaxy. I do think that whether or not you'll like this game simply just comes down to, if you like the GOTG characters, you will probably like this game. If not, this game won't change your mind.

One-ups the first game in almost every regard: platforming and combat are both vastly improved or straight up overhauled, the art style is gorgeous and has so much detail and heart put into every single location, and the story is so much more genuinely heartfelt and careful in its approach to touchy subject matters like PTSD compared to the first game. I do think the ending is a bit noticeably rushed and there's certain plot elements I wasn't particularly fond of like the group of bullies introduced early into the game, but they're minor stumbles in an otherwise great game.

Psychonauts 2 also has possibly the best LGBTQ+ representation I have ever seen in a video game and genuinely almost made me tear up for how good it was. Double Fine will forever have my appreciation for that particular level.

Far more faithful of a remake than the official 3DS remake was, and I personally prefer AM2R's approach of being more of an evolution to the older 2D Metroid titles rather than a full revolution like Samus Returns was. This controls even tighter than Zero Mission does with a ridiculous number of quality of life improvements, and then also using all of those improved controls and mechanics to the fullest extent with the level and enemy design. If it wasn't for Dread this year, I would've said AM2R had the best bosses of any of the 2D Metroid games; I'd still argue it's high up there even with Dread now being out.

I do think some of the Metroid fights start to fizzle out in terms of variety and challenge towards the end of the game, but not to a point that actively hurts the overall game. Fantastic for a fan project, one that stands up there with the official games.

It's very good. This is the first Soulsborne game I've actually finished (the most I've played was around 5 or so hours of Dark Souls before dropping it several years ago), and there was a point in my playthrough after beating several of the bosses where the game finally clicked for me and I couldn't stop playing it.

I do think Demon's Souls is flawed in certain regards, like some of the laughably broken weapon balancing especially towards the endgame (I wasn't even using a magic build which I've heard might as well break the game in half), some unfair and tedious gimmick sections and bosses that are less challenging and more just annoying, and some gameplay mechanics that I know Dark Souls vastly improves upon like how healing items work and the overall progression and world structure. But for a first risky outing from what was otherwise at the time a mostly unknown developer, Demon's Souls succeeds at what it sets to accomplish.

(As for the PS5 remake, it's the best version of the game to play but not one that I would actively go out and buy a console for. Very little was changed from the PS3 version gameplay-wise besides very small quality of life features like being able to send items directly to the Nexus box if your inventory is full. The game runs significantly better than the PS3 version and was locked at 60FPS my whole playthrough, and while the game does look gorgeous, some of the art direction changes I'm not the biggest fan of. There's certain elements that I wish Bluepoint had stayed a bit more faithful to; a problem that I've previously had with Bluepoint's previous remake on Shadow of the Colossus. These issues aren't serious enough for me to not recommend the remake though, and I'd say this is a significant improvement over the SOTC remake in terms of overall faithfulness at least.)

It's good, but I kind of can't help but feel like the genuinely incredible tech is making up for most of the game here. It's fun to play, but I don't think it's quite up to the level that I think A Crack in Time is for me still. The gunplay feels good (especially as a showcase for the DualSense controller and how alt-fires work for nearly every weapon), but might have my least favorite upgrade system of all of the recent R&C games for how little they feel like they change your weapons. Small nearly imperceptible percentage boosts suck for upgrades and I thought we had moved past this a long time ago.

The level design is fine, and I do appreciate an attempt at going back to the more open designs of older titles in the series, but the open areas tend to feel incredibly empty more than anything. They remind me more of Tools of Destruction more than the PS2 titles, especially because the game as a whole is still linear and isn't designed around multiple paths and backtracking like the old games do.

The story is probably the most interesting part, and is right up there with Crack in Time for me being the best of all the modern R&C games. It's still not on par with the PS2 games but I've come to accept at this point that we're never going back to those roots. Rivet is an incredibly interesting protagonist, more than the actual title duo are in their own game here who feel like they're just along for the ride and have very little to do or develop. The last act of the game kicks into high gear and I do like it a lot, but so much of it felt like too little too late by that point; Nefarious should have had more of a presence across the whole game rather than being brought in by the last several hours.

It's an outstanding tech demo, and a fine Ratchet & Clank game that at least reaches for the same standard of quality that A Crack in Time had.

Just a damn great game, even if very fundamentally different to the 2016 reboot. I like Eternal's gameplay flow a lot and how it forces you to understand enemy weaknesses and use them effectively by swapping weapons more often, but also not a fan of how a fair number of enemies can only be defeated by one effective method and nothing else. The Marauder isn't hard, I find him tedious and annoying because he completely breaks the flow of combat because of this.

It's hard to say whether I like this more than 2016 because this game comes with a lot of quality of life improvements that 2016 did not have like the significantly better map menu and the inclusion of fast travel for completionists. Player and weapon upgrades feel like they do way more in Eternal than they ever did in 2016. Level design is more open and creative with layouts and progression, and less prone to getting completely lost like 2016 tended to do, along with far less punishing platforming that's actually fun here. But they have core differences in gameplay philosophy: 2016 is closer to the oldschool Doom games in letting you have a power fantasy, whereas Eternal makes you earn that power fantasy, and will kick you to the curb until you learn what it wants of you.

I look back on this fondly for how much it manages to accomplish despite somehow being an incredibly extended version of the original game's intro. I like the game's ending, even if it's known to be pretty divisive by this point. I do think this game should have been 5 to 10 hours shorter, easily; there is way too much padding by the last act of the game, and the side quests tend to fall into annoying fetch quest territory. Hope the next parts try to avoid those pitfalls, and also fix the flying enemies for the combat because good lord they're the worst part of the game.

This is the best of the modern R&C games after the PS2 titles, no contest. I might actually like this one more than the PS2 titles frankly, for how much of the progression that I had found tedious in those titles was completely resolved in this game. Weapons all feel good and I can't think of a single dud in the entire arsenal when I previously could for all the other games. This tells the best story of all the modern games too, even if I miss the sharp wit of the PS2 titles. Incredibly ambitious in the new stuff it adds compared to the other entries; chilling out flying through space and going to random small planets to grab collectibles and upgrades is just incredibly chill and fun, and feels more like a shame to me that Into the Nexus and more recently Rift Apart didn't come back to. Clank's gameplay finally feels polished and refined, with puzzles that were genuinely really fun to figure out (even if it feels a lot like somebody at the office had just finished Portal that day). Fantastic all around.