Drawdler
Frankly, the Pokémon games have never managed to live up to their core conceit. This series has always been carried by what it could be rather than what it actually is. I don’t think a single one of the games is truly great.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I grew up hyperfixated on Pokémon. Up until my teens, I was a fanboy, plain and simple. I even enjoy the 3DS games to this day.
Thankfully, HeartGold and SoulSilver came out at the perfect time for me to love them, riding off the great wave of Emerald and Platinum in my last years of elementary school. These games were a dream come true to my young self and I treasure that I experienced them when they were brand new.
For as much as Pokémon leaves to be desired, I still hold that HeartGold and SoulSilver represent the peak of the series. This was the last time Pokémon would just iterate on all the features of past games and though sheer scope on its own doesn’t make for a great game, it compliments the core conceit of the series. Monster collecting is so much more fun when the world feels this lived-in and has this many memorable pieces to it and you have something to do with your companions.
There’s an infectious degree of love poured into the detail of HeartGold and SoulSilver that actually makes them pretty fun. I can see so many flaws in these games that I hadn’t as a kid, nostalgia usually makes me more doubtful and critical and despite that, I still think this pair of games is legitimately good.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I grew up hyperfixated on Pokémon. Up until my teens, I was a fanboy, plain and simple. I even enjoy the 3DS games to this day.
Thankfully, HeartGold and SoulSilver came out at the perfect time for me to love them, riding off the great wave of Emerald and Platinum in my last years of elementary school. These games were a dream come true to my young self and I treasure that I experienced them when they were brand new.
For as much as Pokémon leaves to be desired, I still hold that HeartGold and SoulSilver represent the peak of the series. This was the last time Pokémon would just iterate on all the features of past games and though sheer scope on its own doesn’t make for a great game, it compliments the core conceit of the series. Monster collecting is so much more fun when the world feels this lived-in and has this many memorable pieces to it and you have something to do with your companions.
There’s an infectious degree of love poured into the detail of HeartGold and SoulSilver that actually makes them pretty fun. I can see so many flaws in these games that I hadn’t as a kid, nostalgia usually makes me more doubtful and critical and despite that, I still think this pair of games is legitimately good.
2017
This is what I would call one of my “unrateable” games. Other people can quantify their experience on VRChat with ratings, but I don’t feel right doing that, man. For the sake of perspective, if I were forced to rate this, I’d probably give it a 3/10.
At the time of writing, I don't have any VR equipment, so these impressions come from a strictly desktop perspective. The computer I played this on was outdated, but could run most 8th-gen games without issue, so I don't feel VRChat should have run poorly. I know the complexity of games isn't linear, but I don't see why this particular game should have run poorly for me, unless it was just lacking polish.
If you're looking at VRChat, you know roughly what you're in for. I'm giving it a thumbs down for technical issues rather than the culture of the game itself. How the community acts isn't the fault of the platform they use, but currently, VRChat as a platform still has great room for improvement.
Frankly, I don't enjoy much of VRChat culture, so my review DOES come with some bias- but it's not the deciding factor and I still had enough fun to stick with it for a little while. It was part of my rotation to a degree and I’ve known people who absolutely love this game, so I've seen that it can be positive for people and see the appeal from a distance. If you don't care about the experience being sort of clunky and you're curious, go for it.
In my experience though, this game worked really poorly. I swear that every time I’d launch it, VRChat would hit me with a new minor bug. It had screen tearing all the time, completely stuttered at random points, would load just slowly enough to be annoying, I repeatedly had issues where my mouse was stuck scrolling in menus (couldn’t really navigate when this happened, only fix seemed to be restarting the game), I feel my mic worked especially poorly on this game.
I could get used to the interface but it wasn’t great either; there's potential to add a lot of keybind and HUD options that as far as I know don't exist, the menus would have been so much better with some size and speed adjustments and I really feel like the game didn’t have an overhaul to make the desktop experience much better. I'd give it a pass as being made for VR first, but this game has been around for so long that it feels lazy not to improve the desktop experience. Then I’ve heard so many people talk about the developers neglecting this game and actively making it worse, I’m lead to believe it isn’t just the desktop experience that kind of sucks.
The options that were there also weren’t very thorough, so I didn’t feel I could do much about my nitpicks with the interface. If you aren't using a mic then the chatbox is really rudimentary too, leaving you stuck in place while you type and you're just forced to exit the chatbox and abandon your message if you want to move at all. As far as I know, there isn't even something like a little ping to alert you of new chatbox messages, nor built in text-to-speech, you just have to see when they're there.
You also have people using avatars that force crashes- I didn’t deal with them since I generally kept default avatars up- and it's inevitable for things like that to be on a platform like this, but also very obvious that Easy Anti-Cheat doesn't do much for VRChat. With some things I wasn’t sure whether it was the game or user-generated content that had an issue, notably, I would sometimes be flying around randomly when I entered some of my regular maps.
You might wonder why I bothered playing this game, since I had no VR equipment and often engaged with the chatbox rather than mic. Well, first of all, I saw plenty of people who used a mix of VR and desktop, or mic and chatbox- improving the desktop experience and chatbox would help those people, too.
More to the point, to reiterate, there's still fun to be had. It's pretty obvious that the main appeal of this game is how wacky it can get- though it was a double-edged sword for me. Mostly tiring. It’s one of the reasons I quit. But my favorite worlds on VRChat were the "chill" maps designed to sit in, talk, maybe play some music and people have made a few that are genuinely quite nice. It's always good to have more ways I can interact with the people I already care about, we could express ourselves uniquely with avatars and it's free.
VRChat's culture is a matter of personal preference and beyond that I think your enjoyment rests on how much you connect with the tools to express yourself here. I feel like I've seen the same brand of edginess in, say, plenty of Discord servers and a lot of people just aren't responsive- all things considered, it doesn't feel very different from many spaces on the Internet- but if you find good people to wander or just chat with, this can be a uniquely cool platform.
At the time of writing, I don't have any VR equipment, so these impressions come from a strictly desktop perspective. The computer I played this on was outdated, but could run most 8th-gen games without issue, so I don't feel VRChat should have run poorly. I know the complexity of games isn't linear, but I don't see why this particular game should have run poorly for me, unless it was just lacking polish.
If you're looking at VRChat, you know roughly what you're in for. I'm giving it a thumbs down for technical issues rather than the culture of the game itself. How the community acts isn't the fault of the platform they use, but currently, VRChat as a platform still has great room for improvement.
Frankly, I don't enjoy much of VRChat culture, so my review DOES come with some bias- but it's not the deciding factor and I still had enough fun to stick with it for a little while. It was part of my rotation to a degree and I’ve known people who absolutely love this game, so I've seen that it can be positive for people and see the appeal from a distance. If you don't care about the experience being sort of clunky and you're curious, go for it.
In my experience though, this game worked really poorly. I swear that every time I’d launch it, VRChat would hit me with a new minor bug. It had screen tearing all the time, completely stuttered at random points, would load just slowly enough to be annoying, I repeatedly had issues where my mouse was stuck scrolling in menus (couldn’t really navigate when this happened, only fix seemed to be restarting the game), I feel my mic worked especially poorly on this game.
I could get used to the interface but it wasn’t great either; there's potential to add a lot of keybind and HUD options that as far as I know don't exist, the menus would have been so much better with some size and speed adjustments and I really feel like the game didn’t have an overhaul to make the desktop experience much better. I'd give it a pass as being made for VR first, but this game has been around for so long that it feels lazy not to improve the desktop experience. Then I’ve heard so many people talk about the developers neglecting this game and actively making it worse, I’m lead to believe it isn’t just the desktop experience that kind of sucks.
The options that were there also weren’t very thorough, so I didn’t feel I could do much about my nitpicks with the interface. If you aren't using a mic then the chatbox is really rudimentary too, leaving you stuck in place while you type and you're just forced to exit the chatbox and abandon your message if you want to move at all. As far as I know, there isn't even something like a little ping to alert you of new chatbox messages, nor built in text-to-speech, you just have to see when they're there.
You also have people using avatars that force crashes- I didn’t deal with them since I generally kept default avatars up- and it's inevitable for things like that to be on a platform like this, but also very obvious that Easy Anti-Cheat doesn't do much for VRChat. With some things I wasn’t sure whether it was the game or user-generated content that had an issue, notably, I would sometimes be flying around randomly when I entered some of my regular maps.
You might wonder why I bothered playing this game, since I had no VR equipment and often engaged with the chatbox rather than mic. Well, first of all, I saw plenty of people who used a mix of VR and desktop, or mic and chatbox- improving the desktop experience and chatbox would help those people, too.
More to the point, to reiterate, there's still fun to be had. It's pretty obvious that the main appeal of this game is how wacky it can get- though it was a double-edged sword for me. Mostly tiring. It’s one of the reasons I quit. But my favorite worlds on VRChat were the "chill" maps designed to sit in, talk, maybe play some music and people have made a few that are genuinely quite nice. It's always good to have more ways I can interact with the people I already care about, we could express ourselves uniquely with avatars and it's free.
VRChat's culture is a matter of personal preference and beyond that I think your enjoyment rests on how much you connect with the tools to express yourself here. I feel like I've seen the same brand of edginess in, say, plenty of Discord servers and a lot of people just aren't responsive- all things considered, it doesn't feel very different from many spaces on the Internet- but if you find good people to wander or just chat with, this can be a uniquely cool platform.
2023
Banjo-Kazooie if it was good
I have a really complicated opinion on this one, a lot of negative things to say, but I’m still giving this a solid rating and I don’t feel like it deserves any lower or higher. The way I see it, Reignited gets my thumbs up in a vacuum, thumbs down as a remake.
I’m not even sure where to start. I think the overall direction here is kind of gross, way too saccharine. There’s a lot that TFB got wrong. But then, they completely nailed some levels, just enough to keep my attention.
It’s impossible for me not to compare these levels and characters to their original iterations, but I’d have the same praises and critiques if this were an original IP. There are places that TFB’s direction absolutely stuck the landing and genuinely impressed me, a ton of others where I had to wonder what the artists were even thinking.
A pervasive example is the music. Audio direction is consistently poor with bad mixes in tracks, too many synthetic instruments and a weird slant toward realistic sound effects, which clash with the energetic visuals. The voice acting is… not good. A lot of jokes ruined by delivery, a lot of forced niceness. Dynamic music is a good idea, but was lazily applied. The sound only feels like a downgrade from the original trilogy and the classic tracks they included don’t make up for everything else. Huge shame.
On a superfluous level, the visual shortcomings are less obvious. They’re more complicated. Different levels have very different issues, but some I notice at multiple points include lack of secondary/tertiary details, excessively flat textures, color temparature leaning too far in one direction and making less dynamic palettes, aggressive filters and a lack of volumetric effects making environments feel small or cramped. This is for the simplest, most widely-applicable examples. For something more specific, there are points where some design choice makes the tone confusing or weak, like giving the Gnorc world a naturalistic coat of wood- that makes it feel more familiar and friendly, which goes against the entire point of the world. Throughout the whole trilogy, the portal effects and atlas GUI are also gutted.
The strongest levels deliver with more dynamic palettes, stronger textures, strong secondary/tertiary details… they’re all I could have asked for. Shady Oasis is my favorite level here, visually. Some other great levels are Dark Hollow, Dark Passage, Zephyr, Bentley’s Outpost and Haunted Tomb.
For the sake of comparison, TFB would go on to make Crash Bandicoot 4 and that shows a huge evolution from Reignited visually. I don’t begrudge that Spyro and Crash don’t look exactly the same- Crash should have looked better given that it came off more experience and is more railroaded- but since that exists, it highlights even further where Reignited fell short and why those particular levels (among others) actually work for me.
I think I’m latently fascinated with this one. Two things in favor of Reignited: Spyro 2 actually improved overall, in spite of the tonal downgrade- it has the most consistently improved levels, where in the original game many looked vague and empty, plus QoL improvements help 2 the most- and since Reignited has a distinct direction from the originals rather than trying to replace them, it has clear value.
I’ll just never be able to embrace the overall direction here. The problem isn’t that it’s different, it’s just misguided and inconsistent in and of itself.
Any comparison to the original trilogy will make it seem like I’m only looking through rose-tinted glasses, but the originals really were tasteful and polished in a way that this is not. The simplest way to put it is that the original trilogy had cartoonish elements while Reignited just feels like a cartoon.
Still, Reignited is using the original Spyro trilogy as a basis and most of it controls great. Even some of the game feel has me shaking my head, but alas. Based on level design alone, with that sort of flow, this still makes for one of the best modern 3D platforming experiences. Even if you’re like me and don’t really like it, you’ll get something fresh and it has good value.
This will never replace the original trilogy though and for me it will never even match them.
I’m not even sure where to start. I think the overall direction here is kind of gross, way too saccharine. There’s a lot that TFB got wrong. But then, they completely nailed some levels, just enough to keep my attention.
It’s impossible for me not to compare these levels and characters to their original iterations, but I’d have the same praises and critiques if this were an original IP. There are places that TFB’s direction absolutely stuck the landing and genuinely impressed me, a ton of others where I had to wonder what the artists were even thinking.
A pervasive example is the music. Audio direction is consistently poor with bad mixes in tracks, too many synthetic instruments and a weird slant toward realistic sound effects, which clash with the energetic visuals. The voice acting is… not good. A lot of jokes ruined by delivery, a lot of forced niceness. Dynamic music is a good idea, but was lazily applied. The sound only feels like a downgrade from the original trilogy and the classic tracks they included don’t make up for everything else. Huge shame.
On a superfluous level, the visual shortcomings are less obvious. They’re more complicated. Different levels have very different issues, but some I notice at multiple points include lack of secondary/tertiary details, excessively flat textures, color temparature leaning too far in one direction and making less dynamic palettes, aggressive filters and a lack of volumetric effects making environments feel small or cramped. This is for the simplest, most widely-applicable examples. For something more specific, there are points where some design choice makes the tone confusing or weak, like giving the Gnorc world a naturalistic coat of wood- that makes it feel more familiar and friendly, which goes against the entire point of the world. Throughout the whole trilogy, the portal effects and atlas GUI are also gutted.
The strongest levels deliver with more dynamic palettes, stronger textures, strong secondary/tertiary details… they’re all I could have asked for. Shady Oasis is my favorite level here, visually. Some other great levels are Dark Hollow, Dark Passage, Zephyr, Bentley’s Outpost and Haunted Tomb.
For the sake of comparison, TFB would go on to make Crash Bandicoot 4 and that shows a huge evolution from Reignited visually. I don’t begrudge that Spyro and Crash don’t look exactly the same- Crash should have looked better given that it came off more experience and is more railroaded- but since that exists, it highlights even further where Reignited fell short and why those particular levels (among others) actually work for me.
I think I’m latently fascinated with this one. Two things in favor of Reignited: Spyro 2 actually improved overall, in spite of the tonal downgrade- it has the most consistently improved levels, where in the original game many looked vague and empty, plus QoL improvements help 2 the most- and since Reignited has a distinct direction from the originals rather than trying to replace them, it has clear value.
I’ll just never be able to embrace the overall direction here. The problem isn’t that it’s different, it’s just misguided and inconsistent in and of itself.
Any comparison to the original trilogy will make it seem like I’m only looking through rose-tinted glasses, but the originals really were tasteful and polished in a way that this is not. The simplest way to put it is that the original trilogy had cartoonish elements while Reignited just feels like a cartoon.
Still, Reignited is using the original Spyro trilogy as a basis and most of it controls great. Even some of the game feel has me shaking my head, but alas. Based on level design alone, with that sort of flow, this still makes for one of the best modern 3D platforming experiences. Even if you’re like me and don’t really like it, you’ll get something fresh and it has good value.
This will never replace the original trilogy though and for me it will never even match them.