I cannot believe how insanely great this is for essentially a free demo! A beautiful artstyle with a killer soundtrack, creative gameplay mechanics that remix features from other rhythm games, and just a taste of characters that I’m already pretty interested in and can’t wait to see interact more.

I had such a great time with this… it starts out so simple but before long at all you’ll realize just how much can be done with the mechanics in this game. The skill ceiling is already ridiculously high, and I really appreciate the amount of different control options.

I saw the trailer for the full game earlier today and was so impressed by it I immediately tracked this down and derailed the rest of my day. This is unbelievable and already one of the best rhythm games I’ve ever played… if the full game lives up to the potential I see here it will be an easy 10

This mod really impressed me, this feels far more robust than the Team Forever projects. A new super form, a reworked time travel system, and more polished visuals/animations that are extremely faithful to the original all around make this easily my favorite way to play Sonic CD. Never enjoyed the game more than I did this playthrough, some of that is just me further appreciating the level design (it's much better than I used to claim) but some of it is just because of how great this fan remaster feels.

One snag I have is that after I collected all the Time Stones there was this very strange glitch where dying would softlock the game every single time so I had to manually reset the application. Haven't found anyone else talk about this thoughso it might just be me.

If you want to play this please completely ignore the "prerequisites" section on the GameBanana page and just go off of the "requirements" section later down the page, it's so misleading and way more confusing than the actual install. You'll need a data.rsdk file so keep that in mind but they're not hard to find

Simply put, the best feeling GH-like you will ever play. This engine feels perfect, it’s so easy to set up and calibrate, and so customizable that there’s really nothing to complain about here.

Combine that with the ludicrous amounts of custom content (that’s often better than anything from the official games) available for this game thanks to the incredibly talented and constantly active community, and you have a package that’s damn near impossible to turn down.

I gotta say I still miss the animated backgrounds from the base games (tho there is a workaround using pre-rendered videos, but it’s just not the same imo) and the career modes (no workaround for these as far as I know), and that alone is good enough reason for me to continue to go back to the official games.

If this game were able to mimic those features it would be a 10 for me, at the very least it’s without a doubt the most comprehensive experience for quickplay, and the easiest to slip into on a whim. Extremely accessible and perfectly caters to every level of player, thank god for the fan community

Coming from a lifelong Guitar Hero/Rock Band fan, this is incredibly frustrating.

Mechanically the game is just a watered down version of previous titles, the standard instruments don’t have HOPOs, whammying, chords are relegated to exclusively two notes split across a line, and overdrive has been significantly simplified as well. But whatever, it’s a more casual version of the real instrument support that we always knew was coming, and that was supposed to satisfy fans like me.

I am NOT impressed… holy shit how did they fumble this so badly?? It’s only guitar, which is already a big downgrade from any of the Rock Band series. The vast majority of controllers ever produced for the series aren’t compatible. The engine is pretty wonky with awkward strum mechanics. And worst of all, the calibration is damn near unusable. I have no idea what happened but I have NEVER had to spend so long tweaking settings to get a setup that’s even remotely playable in one of these games.

Besides the mechanics, the game is a soulless husk. Fuck Fortnite and its bland ass corporate artstyle, its ugly animations, its total lack of identity aside from sucking up things that people already liked. Fuck this games as a platform bullshit where everything it has to offer is just a lesser version of something else. There’s SO much lost here from the older games in terms of personality, charm, and unique memorable moments.

And I haven’t even mentioned the worst part yet which is this god awful live service bullshit that it forces on you. There is NO base setlist! No modes other than quickplay either! Instead you have a selection of 15-20 songs that rotate like they’re Splatoon maps, making each one frustratingly impermanent. And plenty of those slots will inevitably be taken up by boring picks that aren’t fun to play on any instrument. But don’t worry, take a quick detour to the in game store and you’ll see dozens of songs you’d much rather play, for $5 each!!! Rock Band’s dlc songs were $2 by the way, and that was after an expansive and diverse catalog of fun songs included with the game.

And to whoever wants to tell me “the old games will always be there,” that’s not true!! Rock Band is dead! The servers and music stores for the first three games have been offline for ages, it’s only a matter of time before the same happens to 4, they’ve already stopped adding dlc specifically because they’re focused on Festival now. Any chance I had of getting a real Rock Band 5 is completely gone now.

This would be a 2/10 if the charts weren’t admittedly very good. Nothing else about this game works, it’s a much MUCH worse version of the guitar/bass parts of Rock Band 4 which was already a worse version of Rock Band 2/3. I’m so mad that I had expectations for this at all, I will continue enjoying these charts in Clone Hero.

A whole year already? Maybe the wait for the next one won’t be as bad as I thought.

Look, this is up there with the games I’ve talked the most about already, there’s so many things about it that I love and so many things about it that I can’t stress how much I despise. But given this game is still very important to me, I figured it was worth putting my updated thoughts out there (with the caveat that I have not actually played the game since my near-100% playthrough one year ago).

I’m gonna say the quiet part out loud that so many others seem scared to admit: Tears of the Kingdom was a disappointment. It did not live up to Breath of the Wild or its own series legacy, and most disappointingly of all, it is one of the worst sequels I have ever played. None of this is to imply that the game is bad, and honestly, that’s part of what frustrates me about this game so much. It pisses me off so much all while still having the gall to be, almost undeniably, a really good game in its own right. But I think we’re at a point where we just need to admit that this game was not nearly as good as it could have been or as it should have been.

When the game came out, I said that the story was better than Breath of the Wild’s. I no longer agree with this. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I feel that it’s actually quite significantly worse. For as much as I disliked BotW’s story structure, the story was built around that structure, it wouldn’t have made sense any other way. TotK’s story feels retrofitted to that structure, and so nearly every player will watch chronological events completely out of order. It’s got a singular great moment, but even that is completely undone by the time you reach the ending.

The dungeons I still feel pretty similarly about, which is to say that I believe they are better than Breath of the Wild’s but still far below the standard set by Zelda games of the past. I can articulate my disappointment better now though. Every individual puzzle is good, but they all feel incredibly disconnected from each other. There’s no through-line, no consideration of multiple elements working together at the same time, no logical sense of progression, because the developers feel that being able to approach these in whatever way you want is more important than any of that. I have to wholeheartedly disagree.

And this leads into a more general point I have on the design philosophy of this game. Freedom made Breath of the Wild exciting. The exploration and appreciation of Hyrule was front and center, with dungeons being secondary pieces. I wish they had made the dungeons more important, but fine. It fits with the game’s vision. However, the most critical flaw with Tears of the Kingdom is that its priorities are completely unbalanced.

Let me explain: Tears of the Kingdom approaches freedom in a completely different way. Instead of searching out what you want to do, you get to decide how to do it. BotW dipped its toes into this pool but TotK dives in head first. That’s why you have these incredible abilities that I still think are a remarkable technical achievement. However, if they were going to shift directions like that, they needed to change up much more than they did in every other area.

That goes for the dungeons like I mentioned, but more damning to me is the fact that this game is completely toothless in how it handles Breath of the Wild’s world. Everything is damn near identical, with extra additions in the sky and depths coming off as supplementary and relatively unnecessary. Where are the towns? Where are the interesting memorable locations? They’re on the surface level, and nowhere else. So the vast majority of the content is in the same space as it was in the map from the previous game.

Don’t get me wrong, BotW’s Hyrule is incredible, but it is a map built for exploration and discovery. It is NOT a map teeming with unique content or interesting ways to use all the new mechanics in play. So if you try to play TotK like you would BotW, focused on exploring Hyrule, you’ll almost certainly be disappointed by the lack of changes. I think it’s fair to expect more significant changes than a town being covered by mushrooms or sludge this time around.

Because this world was not designed with these mechanics in mind, things get extremely repetitive extremely quickly. Many can attest to giving up on being creative as soon as they discovered the popular hoverbike technique, but even as somebody who never saw that, I also began using the same copy/paste techniques over and over throughout my playthrough. The more time you spend with this game, you realize how little you’re actually encouraged to use the mechanics that everyone loves so much. It’s not even fun in a sandbox sense because there’s no sense of permanence to your creations whatsoever. Why bother being creative when it’ll disappear the moment you want to go do something else?

The game is a lot better when you gun it to each major quest objective and try not to explore much, but that’s insane to me because the vast majority of content in this game is completely optional. In a game that took me 130 hours on my first playthrough, it’s inexcusable that I’m sitting here saying I regret at least 100 of those hours. There is so much unnecessary fluff in this game, more than any other game I’ve ever played. The shrines are admittedly quite fun, but I can only take so many mini-challenges when there’s so few chances to exercise these mechanics in a properly demanding environment.

It’s so frustrating to imagine that all of these problems could have been solved with an entirely new environment. I had so much fun with the opening island because it seemed like it was going to be everything I wanted from this game! But as we all discovered one year ago today, the rest of the game wasn’t like that first island. I don’t mind the Breath of the Wild formula, but I do mind how lazily it was reused here. These games will NEVER work with repeated maps, and this game was the ultimate proof of that.

Tears of the Kingdom is a good game because Breath of the Wild was a good game. It has a great open world, great mechanics, great atmosphere (even if it is a bit worse now that all the towns are uglier), etc. But it is NOT a good sequel. It blatantly reuses elements without considering how they would be recontextualized with the new mechanical focus. Its new additions content wise are lackluster at best. And because of this it is completely unable to separate itself from its predecessor in a way that every Zelda prior has done with flying colors, even the direct sequels. Hearing this game compared to something like Majora’s Mask is legitimately insulting.

Having had my thoughts develop over the course of the last year, I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that this is my least favorite 3D Zelda, despite everything it has going for it. Nintendo should know to do better. We should know that Zelda deserves better.

Wrote an extremely reactionary response to this right after I finished it where I felt sick for having played it at all because I genuinely believed the game was a suicide note. I’ve looked into it a lot more since then and confirmed that the author is still alive, which made me feel a lot better. Now I’d like to actually talk about the game.

This is a very interesting experience because I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that encourages you to get so hopelessly lost as this one. It’s a walking sim but you’re constantly discovering new environments and events, and there’s always an easy way to reset. The atmosphere is fantastic and it can be a very immersive experience.

This part might just be me but honestly I find this game much more unsettling than most horror games I’ve played. It gets under my skin very easily even though you’re never really in danger, there’s just something about the implied subject matter combined with the atmosphere that really reaches me. The ending is also very haunting to me, although I know lots of people have more positive interpretations of it.

The story is very vague and up to interpretation but honestly I really like that about it, the game has the potential to say so much with so little and I really appreciate that the creator has stayed so quiet on it all. It’s very easy to revisit because of how aimless it can all be (intentionally!!), but it’s also easy to blast through with a guide and just soak in the vibes.

Very strange game but I’ve continued thinking about it a lot, definitely left its mark on me so I’m glad I experienced it

When I was in middle school, this was very rapidly becoming one of my favorite games, and I would play the mobile port any chance I got. Eventually it got to a point where every day after school I would do one no save run of the game. Most days I wouldn’t finish. I only ever made it to the end of the game one time, and I remember vividly how great it felt.

But even then, I was aware of how much easier the mobile port was due to things like widescreen support, smoother framerate, no pit of death, etc. I always wondered how people playing on Genesis ever made it through the game with no save files.

Well tonight I booted up Sonic 2 through the Mega Collection on GameCube to see how 16-bit games look on a CRT, and I was just having so much fun with the game that test run quickly evolved into a full playthrough. I still get really tense around the final levels. But I did it: all on the original version, no save states.

This probably isn’t impressive to most people reading this, but I wanted to leave this accomplishment here as a monument to all the time I sunk into this game as a kid. I love this game so much.

It’s a guilty pleasure idc, Sonic with a sword is cool af and I won’t pretend otherwise

Gameplay wise this is perfectly competent at best, mediocre at worst, I find it mindless fun honestly. But the reason I love this game definitely isn’t the gameplay… this is the end of an era in many ways. The last game to have Crush 40 on the soundtrack, the last game with the best voice cast Sonic has ever had, and the last game to genuinely take itself seriously. It’s the embodiment of everything missing from the soul of the series today and it’s got a surprisingly good story, won’t blow your mind but it’s very heartfelt especially at the end.

One of the coolest final bosses in the series btw and arguably the best selection of vocal tracks

This will probably sound very silly to MMO fans who are used to expansions of this scale, but to me this felt much more like a sequel than a DLC. New areas, new jobs, entirely new story, new dungeons, new everything, it's all a pretty incredible scale. It's almost a running joke in the FFXIV community that Heavensward is where the game finally "gets good," but having finalyl experienced it for myself I have to say I agree! This is a significant step up from A Realm Reborn in every way.

The story is probably the most staggering improvement. ARR was a slow build that was more focused on developing Eorzea than it was any of its characters, a move that I personally feel was the right one given the live service nature of XIV in general. You're going to be spending LOTS of time in this world regardless, so having that early space to really flesh it out and make it believable worked for me, even if that plot was largely lacking in stakes.

By the time we arrive in Heavensward though, all of the core worldbuilding is out of the way and so we finally start seeing legitimately interesting developments. Characters are challenged in new ways, stakes are high, and on top of it all we're still seeing more and more of this beautiful world they've created.

The new areas in this expansion sweep everything I've come to know from ARR. They're significantly bigger, not split up into loading zones, and just generally way more interesting from both a design and visual standpoint. Dungeons now all feel important as they are smartly tied into key points of the main narrative. Bosses are a huge step up as well in terms of spectacle and mechanics.

Even as I have yet to tackle the patch quests that were added post release, I've really enjoyed my time with Heavensward, I'm really starting to understand why this game is as acclaimed as it is and I look forward to seeing where the story takes me next. I'm not sure this will ever be peak FF to me like it is to so many others, but I can absolutely appreciate what the game is going for and I have tons of respect for it.

Took me entirely too long to get around to this, but honestly I’m so glad I finally did! Not only is this easily my favorite of the Halo games I’ve played, but it’s just flat out one of the best shooters I’ve played in my admittedly limited experience.

What really makes this game so much better than the first two to me is the mission design. Where the first game was mostly inoffensive and the second was extremely mixed, 3 makes up for its relatively short mission list with consistently high quality, I had a great time in every single one of these. Most of this game feels like the climax of the story set up in Halo 2, and it leads to an incredibly gripping experience with fantastic set pieces. I’d love to revisit any one of these missions which I’d never have said for the first two games.

I’m tempted to say that story takes a backseat compared to 2, but that’s not entirely true, it’s just not as dense with information and new story beats. 2 got most of the development out of the way so 3 could fire on all cylinders with its action moments and really make that final stretch hit as hard as possible, and they succeeded in my opinion. Made me quite happy as I remember being super unsatisfied with 2’s cliffhanger ending.

It also just made the game work so well for me on a moment to moment level because the stakes are constantly so high. Every mission feels important, you’re constantly on the cusp of something big happening, and most importantly it never feels like it drags so it keeps a fantastic momentum that does a great job of locking you in.

Very glad to have finally experienced this legendary monument of the 360 era, it lived up to all the hype for me. Just wish MCC kept the credits because man that cut-off to the menu was awkward, but I’m not counting that against the game itself obviously.

Unquestionably my favorite 2D platformer of all time and the gold standard I will hold the genre to forever. Each time I play this is better than the last, but now that I have a much better understanding of game design and mechanics it’s even crazier to appreciate.

The controls of this game, just like its predecessor, are perfect. It’s so easy to get into a flow state and feels so good to seamlessly weave between different speeds depending on the situation. The invasion levels and devilishly addicting Challenges mode only further encourage you to master controlling your momentum in this game, and so you do, and the entire playthrough experience turns into this incredible wave of motion that’s impossible to put down. It’s enrapturing.

The level design is the best I’ve ever seen from the genre and I don’t say that lightly. It’s been years since I last played and I still remembered every single one of these vividly. They start simple enough but still provide you with fantastic opportunities to get a good flow going, while also tempting your curiosity in a very natural way with very well placed Teensies. But as the game evolves, the levels become more and more involved, stages become so chaotic here with the amount of stuff happening on screen, and clearly the designers knew how fun it is to go fast in this game because there are so many sections where you’re made to gun it through an obstacle course at top speed, it’s always exhilarating.

The evolution of level themes is also pretty outstanding, it’s a far cry from the more generic level themes of most platformers. It starts with relatively simple yet still unique feeling medieval forests and fantastical swamps before catapulting you into a wildly over the top celebration of Mexican culture, an underwater high-tech spy operation, and a trip through Olympus that eventually takes you into the depths of hell. It’s fascinating to let the game take you on a ride, and that’s ignoring how memorable all of the individual levels are!

Enough people have gushed about how incredible The Mysterious Floating Island is, but that same level design philosophy of guiding you through the world in an interesting and wordless way is present from the first level all the way through the final world. It is mildly annoying that the devs opted for a Mario 64-esque painting level select screen as opposed to a more connected world map, but it’s hard to care too much when the level design itself connects each area better than a dotted line on a map ever could.

All of this without even mentioning the music levels, the fact that a large chunk of stages from Origins are unlockable in game, and the genuinely absurd final optional world that has some of the craziest levels in the history of games as a medium… yeah it’s peak

In some fairness to the game, it’s probably more fun when you’re not under a massive time crunch to finish before the servers shut down forever. Fuck Nintendo!

This one is tough bc stylistically I kinda love this game honestly, Hytopia’s obsession with fashion is so dumb but in the cutest way and it leads to some really silly moments that are perfectly self aware and charming. But actually playing it… wow this is so much worse than I remember.

The structure is an immediate red flag, instead of full on dungeons the game is split into 128 mini-levels, 16 per area. They can be fun, but just like the shrines in BotW, their extremely short length makes it impossible to get any real substance out of them, ideas come and go way too quickly to be worthwhile and the game never really has any good moments where you really have to think.

I think this was intentional bc of the way that you’re incentivized to grind these levels over and over for materials to make all the extra costumes in this game, so they make the challenge more about execution instead of figuring out tricky solutions. Fair enough I guess but… wow these levels suck!

They’re either boring or frustrating with very few being genuinely fun. They also get super repetitive before long, making this game a nightmare to marathon for long sessions (again, fuck Nintendo!). There were plenty of moments where me and the friends I was playing with all asked each other how some of these levels could’ve possible been approved.

The most memorable examples include a minecart chase that’s hectic in the worst way and a room with a redead, an enemy you can only damage with fire, despite the fact that only one team member has the fire item, and then when you kill it it spawns four more, despite the fact that they all have an AOE attacks that takes up half the room. It’s not all this bad, but there is some baffling game design at points. Also who tf decided to implement limited lives in a Zelda game??

I played this as a kid but never had anyone to play with so I never made it far, I thought now that I was playing with friends I’d enjoy it properly this time but no this game is just flat out not good. Makes me really want to try out Four Swords Adventure though!