Cookie Clicker is not really a game, but more so an interesting case study on how games can tap into humans extrinsic motivation through gameplay mechanics, no matter how repetitive and dull that may be. It's only natural that people will feel some sense of reward to see big numbers go up, even if what they did was not challenging or interesting in the slightest, they just helped the gears turned. While we lament trashy low-effort work like this, the reality is that every game has a form of Cookie Clicker baked into it to exploit that extrinsic motivation we all have, it just does a better job masking that cookie smell.

The Japanese box art for Wario World proclaims in bold letters that this is a "Powerful Wario Game" etched in its shiny golden exterior, and if nothing else, Wario does feel extremely powerful. The novelty of this game for me as an eight-year-old kid was having Wario able to piledrive dinosaurs was extremely cathartic, which was something so violent that can never be seen in a Mario game. The entire game's bizarreness from its creepy enemy design (specifically the bosses) to Wario's constantly overly animated face and animations and its weird but varied and memorable soundtrack made Wario World stick with my mind. However, I admittedly never actually finished it until today.

And I can see why now because once you get past the novel charm, this game is painfully mediocre.

Wario World feels like a mesh of ideas that never really come to fruition, from its basic lackluster combat to its level design and platforming to its collect-a-thon elements. Throughout my entire 100% playthrough, It felt like Treasure was juggling too many ideas in a game that only lasts 6 hours, which felt strange coming from a studio that puts out very mechanically focused games. So for this review, let me break down why every aspect of this game feels so flawed in its execution.

1. Combat: Wario has one button for a punch. After you hit an enemy and stun them, you can pick them up to toss, spin or piledrive them. It's very basic for a child to follow, and the enemy AI is so surprisingly passive even in swarms that you can run past them, which is a problem. To remedy this, Treasure had to constantly shove combat encounters into the player's face and make them mandatory, such as the arena sections, the weird crystal monster arena encounters, and the need for taking an object or enemy to piledrive them into puzzle room sections for entry. But the game never actually mixes up these encounters in meaningful ways, the enemies will still behave the same way, they just make enemies tankier. By the time I was into the second major section of the game, I've seen almost everything enemies had to offer, and combat started to become a chore. It's only with the game's boss fights that they offer some form of a puzzle-like strategy to them to make them engaging, but even they start to feel repetitive halfway through them and it's only made worse with their long life bars, but they just kept going (I'm looking at you, Black Crystal.)

2. Platforming: Wario World is a 2.5D platforming game, meaning Wario has a form of 3D space to walk around in but the camera remains fixed the entire time. The problem is that the perspective the camera gives you can be deceptively tricky to judge where you need to position your jumps, combine that with a lack of a drop shadow on Wario and it can lead to frustrating falls just because the camera just needs to always be centered on Wario. It also doesn't help Wario has a subtle amount of traction to him when landing, which may be a fault of overly loose controls. If they wanted to emulate Wario being so filthy and greasy he slips on his own dirty shoes, then I guess they did a good job. It also doesn't help there isn't a lack of movement options baked into the game. Wario has his shoulder charge, sure, but you're not going to use them in platforming sections unless you are trying to kill yourself. He has this jump out of a shoulder charge which the jump arc feels so pathetically short, it just felt like a missed opportunity to add some more depth into the platforming. If the jump arc was say higher while keeping the speed you get from the jump; you would've had a more risky but rewarding option to speedrun the platforming by mastering using shoulder charge jumps at key times.

3. Level Design: The best sections of the game are, ironically, the trap door sections that test the player with a quick puzzle or a platforming section because they offer a unique challenge that breaks away from the main game. (But even that comes with frustration because of the fundamental platforming issues). The main levels ask for you to collect Wario's missing treasure that's scattered around the area. You hit colored buttons and go to the colored areas to find a treasure chest to get the item, but there's more than that to obtain 100%. There are the spritelings, the crystals to unlock the boss door, the Wario statue parts too. While these are pretty satisfying to get themselves, the levels feel like chores to get through, as because of the 2.5D perspective, have to be linear treks through, missing one Wario statue on say the ice hill because you went down the wrong slide will cause you to have to get Wario on a balloon to start all the way back to the beginning, which becomes incredibly infuriating. The level I thought was the most interesting was Pecan Sands because it's a level that goes from the bottom to the top, scattering all the requirements you need around the pyramid instead, which made backtracking a non-issue, as you were going to go around the pyramid anyways. It also had the most challenging puzzle/platforming trapdoor rooms in the game which were enjoyable. But everything before Pecan Sands felt bland to get through, especially when your adventure was paused to get through one of those "required" combat sections that break the pace. Oh yeah, there's also these Unithorn Lairs that serve as a punishment if you fall off a cliff, where you are chased by these purple rhino ghosts that steal your money and you need to break boxes to find the exit, with every other box having a bomb in them. It was terrifying, but halfway through when I dropped into these, I started to roll my eyes having to go through the same escape over and over again that I honestly just wished the game gave me a game over instead.

4. Not enough implementation: My main issue with this game was that Treasure felt like they were focusing on ideas that didn't make the game more enjoyable but instead repetitive, for example, the combat arenas, and discarded too many interesting ideas this game did have. I remember this one section in world 3 where there were these magnet enemies that you had to knock out and then can throw them to stick on these metal parts of the wall where you can then jump on them to get through. It was a neat idea, but the issue was that was the only time it was used. Like I'm sorry, but really? You had to have a team of animators to model this one enemy and programmers to get the mechanic to actually work and you used it for one section of the game? It felt like such missed potential where in a better game would be a central focus. In fact, grabbing stuff in unique and interesting ways in a level to solve puzzles was in a Treasure game before, and it was called Mischief Makers, and it was a more compelling game because that was the main center point, for as many problems as that game had, I say it was more interesting than Wario World because of it's commitment to that mechanic.

The problem with Wario World is that it feels like a jack of all trades but a master of none. It doesn't know if it wants to be a game about enemy encounters with basic combat, a mediocre 2.5D platformer, or a collect-a-thon with limiting levels, so what you get is a 6-hour game that doesn't have the time to flesh out the ideas it set up. This all accumulates to an anti-climatic final boss that was nerfed in the North American release to have fewer phases, where you circle around an arena 5 times to get spritelings to attack the boss for you as it keeps shooting lasers at you so then you can piledrive it, over and over again until it's insanely long health bar goes away. This absurdly repetitive design of this one boss reminded me of the whole game. Overly simple, repetitive, and dull, and I only completed the game just so I can say that I actually finished it 100% and never play it again.

This may be a "Powerful Wario Game" because you can piledrive dinosaurs, but Wario World feels weak in almost everything else.

Fromsoftware is easily my favorite developers in recent times, with Dark Souls 1 being my personal favorite game of all time. But I admittedly never finished Demon's when I originally picked it up a year ago. It was until Bluepoint's remake was announced was when I jumped back into this game to experience what I missed out on.

The first go on this game made me pin down why I dropped before. It's muddy textures, lack of omni-rolling and 30FPS (that sometimes the game can barely hold) did turn me off from any enjoyment I could've had. Demon's also exactly isn't an intuitive game either. Grass is so unbelievably unbalanced that you either can have too much of it or not enough, item burden was also the worst mechanic in a souls game, and for a while it felt like I wasn't doing enough damage to anything, until I learned of an early game weapon that's hidden in the Shrine of Storms that normally scales with magic, but I used it for my strength build for the entire game.

These are also probably the most oppressive areas seen in souls, with no break points in between them. I'm not talking about just their atmosphere (which the game does a great job building) I'm talking in level design. Shrine of Storm has ghosts that shoot lasers while you're walking near bottomless pits, Mind Flyers in Tower of Latria that will stun you and eat your brains up, and Valley of Defilement with tiny plague rats that need to be hit with a certain weapon and have an endless amount of enemies swarming you in tight corridors. Miyazaki and his team did a great job in making these places shitty places to live in, but I think some areas are a bit too cheap for my tastes. (those laser ghosts in Shrine of Storm can fuck off.)

It was until Maneater was when I hit a wall for about a day, as I wasn't very good at that fight. But it was until I used some resourcefulness by using the firepit in the middle to get good footwork around the bosses and messed with their AI I finally did beat them.

Then, something what I can only describe as magic happened: I beat the game in one sitting.

It took me 4 hours after maneater, the only bosses I did before maneater were the 2 in Boletaria, adjudicator, and Fool's Idol. After that though, every boss I would beat on the first try. It was like my hatred for those fucking laser ghosts activated a primal instinct for survival in my brain and made me accumulate all the skills I have learned from playing other Fromsoft games. Even in the games levels I was being more resourceful, saving my grass when needed, switching to the Stealth Ring to avoid detection in the Valley of Defilement, and using other weapons I normally wouldn't for certain situations. Demon's Souls is surprisingly short for an RPG.

After all that, experiencing all the content the game had to offer on my first go, every oppressive area and unorthodox bosses, getting the "good" ending, I sat there as the credit screen scrolled, looking at all the names at Fromsoft who put their hearts making something so unique out of a failed Elder Scrolls clone project, I said to myself:

"Damn, that was pretty great!"

I'm rather jealous of Light Crusader. You mean to tell me this game got a North American release on a cartridge over Alien Soldier which was only avaliable for a limited time on the Sega channel?

Just so Sega can show off things in their marketing like "WHOH DUDES, LOOK AT THESE EYEBALL BUSTING 3D GRAPHICS ON THE SEGA GENESIS!!! EVEN THOUGH THE SEGA SATURN WAS ALREADY RELEASED IN JAPAN A YEAR AGO AND CAME OUT IN NORTH AMERICA A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER!!!"

That's basically the jist of Light Crusader. It's an Isometric 3D Dungeon Crawler made for a D-Pad that feels like junk to actually play. There's a reason the game showers you with healing items and will use them if your health is too low. You're constantly going to get hit by things because of the janky perspective and abysmal attack range, so to prevent player frustration, they have this cheap counter-measure in place.

While I think the dungeons have some really neat puzzles and ideas here, I was asking myself was this really necessary? Was this a game that had to be made on the Genesis? It represented Sega's overambition in one video game that caused Sega to flush money down the drain. A fetish for marketing gimmicks and "revolutionizing the industry" over real substantial game play.

By far Treasure's weakest game, skip this one and go play Diablo instead if you want a take on this that's actually fun.

What is the appeal of this game? I don't mean that in a snarky way, I ask this because I genuinely don't know.

I've only heard nothing but good word about Snowboard Kids 2, but whenever I did actually play it at a friends house, both him and I would be baffled by the game. It's got great music and cool character designs, it's just not a very fun game to play.

It's not a good racing game because it's framerate is just awful and constantly dips, and I can only imagine playing on splitscreen made it worst. Being in a genre where needing to go react to fast incoming obstacles on the track is the center point, having an awful framerate diminishes the game as a whole. I get N64 games were no strangers to low framerates, but there was a reason games such as F-Zero X sacrificed graphical fidelity to target a consistent 60 FPS. Not also it quite literally makes the racing game faster, but it also doesn't make the game feel like junk to play.

It's not a good party game either. Items not also need a form of currency to even pick up but they all feel super underwhelming. They don't feel like they penalize leading players that harshy nor have players behind get a lead. Think about how items in Mario Kart work, they're all absurdly busted and can change the flow of the race itself. While that gives Mario Kart it's bullshit factor, it's key to making it a fun party game while still asking the player to be a good racer and mastering the tracks. The tracks in Snowboard Kids 2 are fine, if not feel a bit samey because they all are downhill treads. But they all feature one thing that I feel overcompensated the party game aspect for this game. At the end of every track, you're forced to go through this tiny gate to ride a ski-lift and it only allows one player at a time and puts you directly to the finish line. Not also it halts the race to a complete stop, it becomes a wrestle match for every player who are all tied with each other. I cannot stress how dumb this feels. Imagine if for every track in Mario Kart every player is forced to line up in an EZ Pass toll gate to even finish a race. It's just plain obnoxious.

I feel Snowboard Kids 2 is one of those rare instances where people say it's good because they have distant memories of playing it with their siblings when they were 8 because it had a funny penguin in it. But they ended up trading it in at Gamestop for that new Luigi's Mansion game for the Gamecube. Now Snowboard Kids 2 runs for like 80$ on Ebay for the cartridge alone (I really hate the retro game market by the way, but that's a discussion for another time) so that means Snowboard Kids 2 must be this amazing cult classic. Unfortunately, I don't care what some rich collector tells me, I don't enjoy this game very much.

I have a lot of respect for Gunstar Heroes. This was Treasure's first game they released but it wasn't the first game they finished. They actually finished that stupid McDonalds game first but they withheld its release to finish Gunstar Heroes first because they wanted an original game first under their belt. Even then Sega almost didn't release the game overseas until one board member pushed for its release, which luckily led to the game receiving moderate success and now is regarded as one of the best Sega Genesis games ever made.

If I did grew up with a Sega Genesis I probably would've loved this game. It's colorful, wonderfully animated, and bursting with personality. And its gameplay is relentlessly chaotic with enemies swarming left and right with so many good built-in level set pieces. On a technical level, Gunstar Heroes knocks it out of the park.

However, because this is Treasure's first game there are some cracks I feel weren't exactly ironed out. Weapon balancing is horrendously broken, pair Chaser with almost any other weapon, my favorite being Lightning, and watch as you hold down the fire button and have a blue line make a square around everything around you, decimate it and move onto the next target. I get mixing and matching weapons is the main gimmick of Gunstar Heroes and it is fun to experiment with, but having Chaser be this absurd turned me away from using a lot of the other combinations. At one point, I shredded a boss in about 1.52 seconds with it which was admittedly very funny.

While some may say "well if you don't like how it trivializes the challenge don't use it", my argument is it should be the developer's job to balance the game, not the player.

I can't say however I didn't have fun with breaking the game in half though. The bosses here are very well designed and distinct in strategy, my personal favorite being Seven Force, which much like in Alien Soldier, that boss fight is just as good here, but now with actual seven phases on harder difficulties. Gunstar Heroes will no doubt challenge the player on these encounters, but I think using Chaser and just holding A while dodging attacks makes these fights less engaging.

I enjoyed most of the levels themselves, except for Blacks stage, where I was shocked to see Dice Game from Devil May Cry 4 as the center gimmick of the level, and unlike in DMC4 you can't determine the outcome. I seriously hope these board game levels never exist in any video game after DMC4, because they just are as primitive as in this game.

Gunstar Heroes is definitely made to be played in Co-op but it's also perfectly balanced for single-player too. Which the next time I do another run of this game it'll be with a buddy, as I want to see just how much we can break the game by using 2 chaser weapons.

It's a beautifully charming Co-op shooter that embraces its ridiculousness, and that would soon go onto define Treasure, being the developer that would make the world's most batshit craziest games.

Ever since I played Treasure's Alien Soldier and fell in love with it, I decided to start looking around in Treasure's other games. I have played Wario World (I think it's okay) and I have Gunstar Heroes and Sin and Punishment on my backlog, but the one game that is always talked about is this one: Ikaruga.

Treasure themselves are very strange developers, as the games they make are for the most die hard of action games fans. AKA: Insane people, like myself. Their library mostly consists of renowned cult classic action games or anime game shovelware. Looking deep into their company philosophy though, they have said time and time again that they take these shovelware commissions to raise funds to make the games they want to make, and for their fans, never worrying about how well they actually sell, which is one of the reasons why they created Ikaruga.

Ikaruga is probably Treasure at their most focused on what they make best: good arcade centered action games. Designed as a sort of spiritual successor to Radiant Silvergun, another one of Treasure's original games, Ikaruga on the surface seems like just a typical bullet hell spaceship shooter. Now I've tried my fair share of them before such as Touhou, but I could never really properly get myself into them. They're designed to be overwhelming as you navigate yourself around a seemingly maddening series of one hit kill bullets with your deceptively small hurtbox as you fire away at a boss fight till it goes away. They have their audience no doubt, but mastering them has always seemed like such a steeper challenge as it involves a lot more reflex mastery and memorization from the player to get the most enjoyment out of them and yes at times that can feel exhausting. Ikaruga is still like those games but what makes it stand out from those other bullet hell games is the Polarity System.

The premise is simple: by pressing the B or O button, your ship will change from White to Black and vice versa. What this means is not also you do double the damage to ships of that same color, but you also absorb bullets of that same color. Yes, you read that right, you absorb bullets in a bullet hell game, and the bullets you absorb fills up a meter on the side which allows you to launch powerful shots to clear the screen. You think that would trivialize a lot of the challenge here, but that's where the other color comes in, as you have to make sure you avoid the opposite color or else your spaceship will explode. And the game will test you on this gimmick constantly, as not also patterns will constantly mix up on bullet colors, but on the hardest difficulty enemies will shoot an array of bullets of their color upon death.

The lead designers of this game has often described Ikaruga to be approached as a puzzle game that just so happens to have shooting mechanics baked into it because of the Polarity System. While you can think that statement is a bit too general, it's an interesting way to describe the utility of the Polarity System because it doesn't make the game revolve around just maneuvering around the bullets while pumping the enemies full of your own, but it also gives the game a sense of strategy. Every encounter you ask yourself where the enemy is, what are they doing, what are they firing, what form should you be in and when should you be dodging bullets or switching colors, taking a very simple mechanic and giving it layers of depth and nuance.

Breaking the game down like this probably made the game sound easier than it actually is. No, far from it. Ikaruga is the hardest game I've ever played and it's not even close. Yet I'm not swayed from it because at it's core, Ikaruga is not your average spaceship shooter. It's challenging, relentless and frantic but also wildly addicting and mesmerizing, backed by a kickass soundtrack which seems to be a Treasure Games staple.

So, as a recommendation, try this one out, even if you aren't particularly into bullet hells. Switch the game into Free Play mode and do a couple of playthroughs on that. Then, as you get a feel for the game, take those training wheels off and let yourself be caught in the wonderful puzzle-like flow of Ikaruga.

Also check out Alien Soldier that game is fantastic like oh my god words cannot describe how-

Dead Space and Dead Space 2 were pretty solid Action-Horror hybrid games. While those games had their own fair share of flaws, they were focused on what they wanted to do and they clearly had a lot of passion put into them from the developers Visceral Games and I can easily recommend them to any Horror game fan.

This game however is the equivalent of your parents telling you your hopes and dreams mean nothing and are unachievable and make you go to college for like Accounting or whatever. What I mean is that this game was clearly meddled by EA to warp the game into something more marketable because apparently, Horror games aren't very marketable anymore even though games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent proved them years before that's not true and Five Nights at Freddy's would be released a year later and go on to become an Internet sensation to once again also prove that wasn't true.

So instead of making a horror game, the best way people in business suits at the time thought to sell video games to people in the most uninspired way possible was to make a Gears Of War clone, and not a very good one. Isaac still moves like he's on molasses and he can't hip fire because he wasn't designed for other shooting enemies in mind, so they added in a cover-based system to the game and a very buggy one at that. It feels as if it only works some of the time and doesn't convey what is cover versus what isn't very well. It's horrendous.

The limb-based shooting of the original games have been discarded as shooting limbs doesn't really seem to matter anymore. You can just blast the aliens just how you would to a regular guy anywhere and it doesn't seem to make a difference. They all are just bullet sponges that just charge at the player from anywhere on the map in swarms which is the most uninspired way of programming AI enemies imaginable. The game is focused on having the player craft their weapons into ridiculous ways imaginable and yeah while that's fun on paper it also breaks the balance of the game to an absurd degree which removes all tension this game could have built.

Dead Space 3 also decided it wanted to be a Co-op game... kinda. It has scenes that clearly the second player should be in while also being shoehorned in other scenes. There are setpieces where the second player should be in while others feel as if he gets in the way. It's just overall distracting like he's your imaginary friend and honestly, I wouldn't subject any of my friends through this dumb story.

Oh yeah, the story, which is probably tied with Bioshock Infinite in levels of stupidity. It's a moppy love triangle between Isaac, his ex-girlfriend, and some other guy who I can't remember. Then the other half is the marker story established by Dead Space 1 and 2. But the thing is, that love triangle subplot and the character's dumb actions mean I really hate everyone in this game. It's laughable just how bad the plot in this game really is.

I just can't respect a game that a publisher was so worried about making more money than the mountains of money that they already have that they were willing to destroy an entire franchise's identity in an attempt to get those dollars in their pockets. It didn't work and because of that, it caused Visceral games to shut down, making hundreds of employees lose their jobs.

So yeah, fuck this game.