Wind Waker always been a favourite of mine, so much to love in it with its artstyle, fluid combat, great soundtrack and setting it just has so much charm. It has its flaws like its padding towards the end but its highs just outweigh it. The game does have weaker dungeons and just struggles from being too easy all around. This time going for 100% I did the savage labyrinth which was no issue still despite being the supposedly challenge of the game. The game also struggles with a lot of it's side content being repetitive, majority of the heart pieces come from sea charts and the obvious triforce quest is just proof that there are missing dungeons. But even then the game is still so good at times because its strengths are that good.

Sonic 1 Forever is, by default, the best version of Sonic 1, entirely under the basis of being a spruced up take on the already fantastic mobile port. Widescreen, Tails and Knuckles, customisation options for things like the elemental shields and a seventh Chaos Emerald, all that's here and accounted for. Grab your happy ass an APK of the game that you can find in 10 seconds with a Google Search, and you're off to the races. It's still Sonic 1, so your mileage may vary on the game part of the game, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better way to experience the original title that made the blue hedgehog an icon.

But what really drives Sonic 1 Forever home to earn the title of "The way to play Sonic 1"? Is it the spiffy new UI that features remixes of 8-Bit Sonic 1's OST? How about even more customisation options to spice up my 2500th playthrough? Mod support? Playable Amy?

Nah, it's just cause there's a mode that lets you play golf. Like, straight up fucking golf in Sonic 1. How is any other Sonic 1 release even supposed to compete?

I've never seen a Mario RPG to the end before because they're always too basic for my liking but this is the "GOAT" I've been hearing about for so many years and yeah it definitely grabbed my attention more than the rest. The level design is kinda 90% straight hallways and it takes way too long to traverse them with no PM64 spin or anything, and the story while leagues above typical Mario fare is still nothing crazy for RPGs - just a "collect the thingies and beat a demon" plot elevated by some humorous side characters. But I really was expecting some more unique environments after Boggly Woods' striking un-Mario appearance and the seediness of Rogueport. Only the Twilight Town really reached that level of different after that, and backtracking just got worse from there. It's surprisingly the combat which kept me interested in the slowest parts, specifically the badge system. You can combine them in the most optimal way to the point you can break the bosses in half with amazing attributes, or go the opposite direction and set handicaps on yourself to make it harder. Each of the partners introduce further mechanics and the perfect timing superguard and stylish mechanics also added more depth. So I enjoyed the gameplay quite a lot overall.

This is not an example of a masterpiece RPG or how to "make RPGs better" or whatever millennial Youtubers have been calling it, but it is a good example of how much cooler the Mario series can be without restrictions to maintain a squeaky clean brand, and also a good introduction to the wider genre. But that hasn't really worked as most Paper Mario fans downright refuse to engage with other RPGs, and later entries didn't expand on this formula but stripped all those mechanics out... The remake also appears to be rewriting most of the risque dialogue.

Remember when later Guitar Hero games had songs that can't do anything but have boring easy-mode charts? Yeah, that's this.
Pair it with a really shitty rotation model where if you want to play a song for any other period than when it shows up for a few days, you have to pay 5 whole dollars for it and only when it's in the item shop, and you've got Fortnite Festival.

Pair it with incredibly boring visuals, as you've got a very ugly giant stage with band animations going below even GH2 quality, but hey, during those long breaks certain instruments will get in songs due to a bad track-list, you can use your emotes!
There's really no huge flair either, there's nothing like the audio getting filtered when using Overdrive, the particles while you're using it are very small and tied almost entirely to just your player, and most of them are battle pass/shop purchases anyways.

Generally it just is very clunky as well, you can't quick restart a song or practice it, instead you can just jump into the song from the start and if you fuck up you have to back out to the main-stage with on some songs this being a downtime of like 40s.
You've also got to deal with the fact that all the notes share the same color so on harder tracks (if you can actually FIND one) it's a bit annoying to deal with as it's harder to read for no other reason than it has to be the Fortnite purple color.
Lastly there's just a lot of instabilities, It's on the second season now and there's still major issues with just random hitching in the middle of songs (far better than it used to be at-least) and crashes happen randomly as well.

AAA Licensed Rhythm games are pretty much dead, and this is the best you'll get out of it in the modern industry, just move on and go download like Clone Hero or YARG or something.

Epic, Stop trying to make metaverse Fortnite happen, It's not going to happen, nobody plays the shitty racing mode, Festival is mediocre, Lego Fortnite has been nothing but boring and the Creative mode's expansion has pretty much exclusively been used to make things that you could already play, like arenas or boxfights etc. but now they have a random theme of Streamer/Country/IP, or just are something I could have played in ROBLOX back in 2009, it's not working and players are just going to jump to the one where they already have all the different things they want to make.

Fortnite Festival added support for rock band controllers!! I love my new Riffmaster. It's a really solid controller that I can't wait to play Clone Hero and YARG with instead of Fortnite Festival.

Instrument support in Festival is a hot mess at the time of writing. Navigating menus is a pain in the ass on the guitar controller. I'm not sure if this is a specific Riffmaster issue but tilting the guitar to activate overdrive sometimes just straight up does not work. Only the Riffmaster or expensive used Rock Band 4 controllers are currently available to use for the Pro instrument modes as of now, with keybinding support coming at a later time. The vast majority of the Pro charts have been improved from their normal charts (Sandstorm and i were two favorites of mine) but some songs - particularly keys only charts - just aren't as fun on a guitar controller instead of the keyboard (Boy's A Liar). I noticed Everlong got a bit neutered too in the translation from RB2 to Festival.

We're now in Season 3 and the song list has grown pretty significantly. Quality is still all over the place, with a couple new surprise bangers (Ella Baila Sola) with fun charts... but the majority being kind of dull TikTok songs or ports from older Rock Band games. This season is Billie Eilish themed - I'm neutral on her music but a lot of it just is not that exciting to play in a rhythm game.

It's kind of obvious at this point that Harmonix has struggled to adapt their game to the live service model, and I feel for the developers trying to deal with all the quirks of Fortnite's frequent updates, UE5 issues and pushing out between 5 and 9 new songs per week. Issues that Festival has had since the beginning have still not been ironed out, for example:

No way to easily restart a song
Song list UI is still pretty terrible
Cannot view leaderboards for songs not in the rotation
Goofy canned animations
Glitchy stage visuals
No way to deal with people afking in multiplayer
Still no practice mode
Wonky lift notes and overdrive detection

The core 5 key Harmonix rhythm gameplay is still fun and I like to see Kratos singing my favorite songs so I still play, but it's obvious at this point the future of plastic guitar games is community built stuff like Clone Hero. I understand they're still ironing the kinks out of the live service rhythm game niche they're trapped under, but as someone who has put thousands of hours into Rock Band games, it's hard not to be disappointed with Fortnite Festival.

All the issues of Breath of the Wild are still issues in Tears if the Kingdom. Dungeons are still way worse than in traditional Zelda games, story is not good, weapons still break too often. And the map is reused in a way that actually does make it feel like the same game again. It's cool that the sky and the depths exist, but all the main content is in the areas you have already explored in the previous game. In my opinion, that alone makes Breath of the Wild the better experience.

Tears of the Kingdom is a pretty messy experience imo, technically impressive at it is. If you've never played Breath of the Wild you'll be more impressed with it but still probably be let down at the game's most visible weak points. I don't think anyone could argue that the Imprisoning War cutscenes were handled well.

It's still a good game with a lot to offer. Ultrahand is awesome. Fusing stuff can be a lot of fun. Caves are a great addition to the game world. The final boss sequence was pretty cool. But I felt like I had already played the game even when it was technically new. It's a solid game but I don't think they did everything they could have to make it an outstanding one

Hi-Fi Rush is incredible. I'm here to mourn Tango's passing, and to tell a story.

I graduated from high school in 2010, got into my second choice college, and lasted exactly 1 semester before getting thrown out. Long story, it was only partially my fault. Point is, coming back home after that was weird. Working full time, doing community college, making and losing friends, meeting the woman I'd eventually marry, I was busy. Busy meant a lot of driving. Driving meant listening to a lot of music. Music meant listening to the local indie station, who, among many other bands, started playing a little Welsh rock group called The Joy Formidable. Of everything they gave airtime, it was their work that resonated with me the most.

As I was playing through Hi-Fi Rush for the first time over a couple sitdowns I joked with friends that the game felt personalized for me and me alone. Rhythm character action cel-shaded comedy? You couldn't concoct a more Demetri-ass concept without also serving me a hot gyro. I enjoyed every single decision made, particularly in the audio department. So imagine my reaction when I get to the surprisingly impactful climax and its gorgeous, massive construction zone, only for one of the most emotionally charged songs of my entire life to start thumping in my ears.

There's not an ounce of embarrassment in my heart when I tell you that I teared up hearing Whirring in the final level of Hi-Fi Rush, and I wouldn't have dared pause to wipe them away. I cannot think of another video game level that made me feel so much so strongly so quickly. I don't know anybody at Tango Gameworks, but I feel like I do. Or should. At the very least I want to thank them personally.

Hi-Fi Rush may not be perfect for everyone, but it is for me. Together we're unstoppable.

I only really played Majora's once before this back in 2018, I was close to finishing a replay of the N64 version in 2021 but stopped in Great Bay. It always ranked low on my Zelda ranking but replaying it now really made me appreciate it way more this time. The darker tone is something I appreciate more nowadays and the dungeon design is really good for majority of it. Coming straight from OoT I realized there was a lot this game did better and stuff it did a little worse in. The 3 day time cycle isn't for everyone but I loved it, it isn't too stressful when you learn the game but can prove to be a learning curve for new comers. It isn't too overwhelming though as song of inverted time really helps make it easier. All transformation masks are really fun to use with Zora being my personal favourite. The side content is some of the best in any game, the Anju and Kafei side quest is probably my favourite side quest in any game to this day.

The original 3DS version isn't that good, nerfs difficulty heavily and adds stupid stuff like eyeballs and removed a lot of what made the original good. Project Restoration really fixes almost everything, there are stuff it can't fix like Gyorg and Twinmold completely but it does the best it could and is a really good way to play the game and probably the best until 2 Ship 2 Harkinian comes out later this year.

A couple months ago, I decided to breathe some new life into my old, beat up Sega Dreamcast, and transferred its internals into a new shell. While I was up in them guts, I figured I'd go the extra mile and put in a PicoPSU, Noctua fan, and (most importantly) a GDEMU clone. I own three Dreamcast games on disc, they're all Sonic and they're all scratched to hell, and considering the longevity of Dreamcast disc drives, it did not pain me to rip that sucker out of there. Besides, an SD card opens me up to games I'd never dream of affording...

Anyway, I 100%'d Sonic Adventure 2 again. God damnit, why do I keep ending up here?

I explicitly told myself I would not, but looking at my childhood save file, I was maybe eight to ten hours of actual work shy of running through Green Hill, which I've previously unlocked twice on two different versions of the game (the Dreamcast original via emulation, and Battle for the GameCube.) It's not like I had something to prove so much as I hated the idea of leaving something undone, even if it meant feeding a Chao the same skeleton dog over and over again for three hours while alone in a dark room. Oh well, my time could not be less valuable.

I bring all this up because I'm going to say some fairly disparaging things about Sonic Adventure 2 - which for a lot of people sits in this exalted "sacred cow" position - and I just need everyone to accept that I've done my time with this game and feel pretty strongly about it.

Sonic Adventure 2 condenses Sonic Adventure's six distinct gameplay styles into three, and makes each of them more robust, which on paper sounds great. Sounds like something you'd do with a sequel, cut all the filler and build out from what worked... Only, I think adding more to the mech and emerald hunting stages makes them a total drag to play. What was once arcadey and enjoyable is now bloated and boring, sometimes outright frustrating. Sonic and Shadow get the best levels of the bunch, but given how often these brief bursts of fun are interrupted, does it even really matter?

Even setting aside my grievances with the way these modes are designed, I feel like Sonic Adventure 2 is just... sloppy. It has the collision detection of a cheap D-tier licensed platformer, with characters constantly juttering and clipping when making slight contact with uneven surfaces. Even flat surfaces are temperamental given how often Sonic, Tails, or Knuckles will catch on some 1 pixel tall seam. The camera is uncooperative, characters move inconsistently, and every part of the geometry feels like it's held together by Elmer's glue and tongue depressors. So much as brush a corner wrong and the game will shut off whatever complex calculation it needs to run to determine momentum. Having done this three times now, I can confidently say the worst part of the 180 emblem experience is fighting with the parts of the game that are unpredictable, like, you know, landing on a solid stationary platform and just falling through it.

This is all coming from the guy who frequently writes Labyrinth Zone apologia on Backloggd Dot Com, so I can't stress enough that my opinion on this shouldn't be taken as some condemnation of those who enjoy Sonic Adventure 2, or a statement that I'm more right for having a dissenting opinion. There's thousands of you and uh... I don't think there's even a dozen people that like Labyrinth. And hey, Sonic Adventure 2 isn't without its charm. I've previously praised the excellent soundtrack, which I remember owning once on CD (which also got scratched to hell), and though I hated the tonal shift SA2 made at the time, I think it's probably the best part of the game now. The voice clips cutting off, Grandpa Robotnik being put in front of a firing squad... it's not good, but it's good.

Unfortunately, it's not enough to bring me around on the game as a whole package, and I feel like the amount of hours I've logged both qualifies my dislike while calling into question my sanity. Sometimes you go for 180 emblems in Sonic Adventure 2 while playing Mario Party 6 while playing In Sound Mind while playing Shining in the Darkness. Sometimes you're just that kind of depressed, where you're glad you don't live with someone who could walk by your room and see you running through Mad Space and think "oh god he's spiraling." But it doesn't matter now. I'm finished. I never have to do this ever again.

Oh hey, Sonic Adventure 2 Battle is on sale on Xbox...!

A pretty flawed game in terms of how it handles quests and story but an incredibly ambitious one. I can't think of anything else that would make you wait 30+ hours to unlock one of the main selling features, but there's something about working your way up as a blade on that harsh planet that makes the moment you finally get a skell license and eventually take flight so special and satisfying... It completely changes the world you've come to know so far. Soaring around an exceptionally designed open world fighting monsters in the sky with Hiroyuki Sawano music blasting is something you won't find anywhere else.

So many things about XCX make it feel like a true evolution of XC1, in gameplay and art design, complex mechanics, intricate area layouts, so much customization and freedom, that were all just thrown out of the window for the next entries. The whole thing feels genuinely impossible to pull off on this toaster of a console, its scale and visual fidelity impressed me more than anything on Switch ever has. In the best way it doesn't feel like a Nintendo game at all.

I really enjoyed spending most of last month chilling exploring this alien planet. It's just been sitting on my shelf for years unplayed after I failed to get into it before, and it ended up being my most enjoyable Xenoblade experience since the original. 1 and X truly feel like they're in a different series from 2 and 3 to me. Had I played this back in 2015 I don't think I would have been nearly as impressed by BOTW, or any open world for that matter. I would recommend checking it out now because any future port is going to be missing some stuff, it's very tailored for the Wii U unfortunately.