It has been several days since I completed Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, and still I find it impossible to compose my thoughts. The experience has shaken me to my core... nay, it has destroyed it. What was I before Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device? Do I even care? I am not so desperate a masochist that I would contemplate my previous existence any farther. I have left that grim, ignorant darkness. My life before this game was one of waste and sloth... desolate of purpose. Boldly, Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device subverted my every expectation and has remade me in its image. Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device is not merely a game, it is mockery. It is a cruel and merciless indictment of all our hubris. Mortal hands will never again achieve the rapturous bliss that is Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device, and to chase it would end only in calamitous despair. 9.5/10.

Aside from the art style that was mired in unfair controversy, the highlight of Wind Waker as a Zelda game is the sense of exploration. Unfortunately the actual act of exploring can be frustrating and tedious. As much as I love taking in the art and the music on the high seas, sailing gets old very quickly, and exploration goes unrewarded for almost all of the game. Early on in the game, islands mostly fall into two categories: Islands that are significant later in the story but not now, and side islands that can't be plundered without items from later in the game. Once the player reaches a point in the game where they can be reasonably confident that exploring will not be a waste of time, they end up doing a world tour and uncovering the whole map at once, zone by zone, rather than slowly over the course of the game, which I think is a shame. The last few minutes of the game are incredible and the opening is quite strong as well... it's the middle that's the problem. Dungeons are adequate fail to impress and it certainly feels as though one or more were cut from the game. The mandatory late-game world-spanning scavenger hunt is always a risky trope, and it's implementation here is pretty infamously poor. One would think that finding a piece of the Triforce wouldn't be as unceremonious as just scraping it off the ocean floor. The HD version wisely moves the pieces instead to the locations that once held the charts which led to them. This also cuts out the excruciating fees that Tingle demands in his role as middleman and the game is better for it.

Even more fun than I've been saying it would be ever since they announced Mario 99. F-Zero was made for exactly this. I just wish that it were a game mode in a big, beautiful new AAA F-Zero game. Fortunately, it's likely that this is testing the waters for exactly that. Maybe if people actually play this extremely fun, completely free game (if you have NSO which it'd require anyway) instead of bitching and moaning about it not being exactly what they want, we'll actually get that game.

Or you can review bomb it and send the message that F-Zero will never sell so they can put the franchise back in the NeverEver Closet and you can be part of the problem.

My first playthrough of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (there will be more) took over one hundred and thirty hours. I spent most of that time screaming.

I have complaints, make no mistake. The demo for Rebirth cooled me off so significantly that I almost started squirming about the fact that I had taken time off work for the full release. There were a few choice moments where unnecessary deviations from the original's storytelling, such as in one of the first battles of the entire game, left me sour and skeptical. I have read every Final Fantasy VII book, or at least some shitty fan translation thereof. I know just how bad ALL of the compilation stuff is, and even after what I felt was an adequate performance in Remake, I still had my doubts about how well the writing staff truly grasped their own story. Some of those minor changes made me question this, and at other times an overwrought orchestra drowned what should definitely be an emotional scene wrapped in golden silence, but I could not have possibly imagined the absolute mastery Rebirth has over the characters and tone of its source material.

The moment-to-moment character and scene writing in Rebirth is the best that Square has ever produced. I refuse to dilute that statement with qualifiers. It is as hilarious as it is impactful. It is a script that could only ever be written by someone who is in deep, sincere love with every one of its characters, as well as the quaint yet outlandish stupidity of 90's video games and everyone who loved them. It is a blatant refusal to tone down its freakish, lovable soul.

Rebirth is the best time I've had with a video game in almost a decade. It represents everything that anyone has ever liked about Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts II, Final Fantasy XV, or even Chrono Trigger. It is a non-stop landslide of delightful surprises, and it had me yelling aloud at what must have been close to once per hour. Its characterization is flawless, its music is divine, its visuals remain on the cutting edge, and for most of my seventeen-day playthrough I could not stop smiling.

I would be willing to name Rebirth my Game of the Year here and now, in March, by virtue of the writing's perfect audacity and unmatched playfulness alone. Fortunately for me, I don't have to pretend that gameplay doesn't matter. Remake's battle system was already the best Final Fantasy had ever seen, and one of the best in Action RPG history. In Rebirth it has been further improved by valuable tweaks to the various characters, new mechanics, and better encounter design. Considering that players spend probably a third or more of their time in Rebirth fighting, that's an obvious blessing.

In discussing the rest of Rebirth's gameplay activities, I'm going to play coy, as the surprises should remain surprises, but I will at least address the somewhat depressing presence of towers and map icons. To put it briefly and simply, they're fine. The concept itself may be played out, and some players may sigh in exhaustion at the very thought of them, but Rebirth's map icons are, for the most part, well-varied, entertaining, and unlikely to incite much tedium. They are distributed reasonably well and contain enough diverse flavors of interest to be worthy supplemental story material. Frankly, after finishing a marathon of tightly scripted narrative setpieces, it's nice to have some more "filler" activities to hang out with at one's leisure.

The greatest strength of the SNES and Playstation Final Fantasies was that they never lingered on any one thing long enough for the player to get bored of it. They were iconic, memorable setpiece parades, full of goofy, stupid minigames, bizarre sidequests, lovable characters, and eventually wild, confusing twists that online gorillas will fixate on in a way that is devastatingly literal and utterly oblivious to thematic intent. Many, including me, thought the exact cocktail represented here to be fully extinct. Having it served to me now, by largely the same people who wrote the recipe, roughly twenty years after I began to fear it lost, is rapturous. Rebirth has given me some of the most glorious highs of my entire gaming career.

For the first time since Final Fantasy X, I feel entirely satisfied with a full Final Fantasy release in the way I did when I was a child. It fills me with hope for the near future, and an absolute, unconditional confidence in the inevitable Final Fantasy X-3.

Since F-Zero GX, Nintendo has made time to produce three mainline Pikmin games in-house, and zero non-GBA F-Zeros. Every mainline Pikmin game has sold worse than every mainline F-Zero game.

Now don't get me wrong, I like Pikmin. I like Pikmin a lot... but all of those games are highly similar, so the usual Nintendo reasoning that there needs to be some exciting new gameplay justification for a new entry rings pretty damned hollow here, when a Tetris/Mario/Whatever 99 style online multiplayer high speed high fidelity F-Zero seems like the biggest no-brainer technology-enabled gameplay reason for a new F-Zero game one could possibly imagine, but lets assume for a moment that current online infrastructure, even with rollback netcode, simply could not handle such a thing.

Listen. If the world can't handle the online yet, then just let Sega make an F-Zero Yakuza where Falcon pummels alien freaks and has drinks with Samurai Goroh. I don't even care if there's racing it. Please. Just please... somebody do something. PLEASE.