It cost me 100 hours of my life, two marriages and at least one kidney, but I finally beat Pokémon Pearl.

...

I liked it a lot.

Sekiro rightfully earns its spot as my second favourite FromSoft game. The Souls formula is still there, but the gameplay is fairly different now. Taking Bloodborne’s aggressiveness encouragement another step forward, Sekiro rewards not giving the enemies a chance to breathe more than ever. Boss battles are a tug-of-war of trying to break each other’s posture and perfect blocking to mitigate it. The dodge button pushes you forward by default and you often hope to have your attack blocked more than a it be a direct hit. Some of my favourite FromSoft bosses reside in this game with the final boss perhaps being my favourite overall. Level design is also at its best with the game finally giving you a greater range of movement and verticality with jumping and grappling. There’s even decent stealth mechanics. Sekiro was a really pleasant surprise and I hope they continue The Wolf’s story.

In every possible sense, this game pioneered the gameplay and themes of Death Stranding. With their environmental messages, quiet yet persistent protagonist, walking-simulator/goods-delivery gameplay, and tactile interfaces, they truly share the same DNA. There are superficial examples too, of course. Smoglings = BTs. Sergeant Smogglor = Higgs. Toys = people with DOOMS. Chet = Die Hardman. Monkey Burgers/Chocolate/Leaves = Smart Drugs/Optical Media/Action Figures. Think about it, man. Think about how you have to mash through dialogue every time you return to the terminal. Early on you're just running around like an asshole before you find a bike across a river. So you unlock the ability to repair bridges (seriously). Then after riding the bike for a bit it breaks. Then you unlock the ability to create a better bike, and eventually a four wheeled electric vehicle. There are windmills you can place to recharge your batteries at. You even use happiness points to build roads that make traveling across the vast landscape smoother. As you deliver items to the NPCs who already know you by reputation they slowly reveal more to you about their hopes and dreams, and shower you with appreciation. You probably think this is a fucking joke, don't you? That I'm making this all up for attention? Well you're wrong, kiddo. Somebody needs to hold Kojima accountable for this thievery. These are the same guys that made bit Generations and Art Style for fuck's sake, I will not see their works lost to time in favor of AAA kinogames!

It’s impossible for me to review this game objectively, I was a QA tester on it in the last month or so of development. I didn’t particularly care for the gameplay, I spent my days wandering around the maps poking my head into corners and feeling fairly motion sick until the afternoon came and I had to duck out to finish out my two weeks notice at my last job. Getting into video games through QA is a fools gambit, I knew that then but it was a small company and I was a computer science major, it seemed like there was potential to do some real work. Anyway game development opportunities are rare in northern Alberta and it beat working at Staples. Before my last two weeks in retail ended the studio manager politely suggested that maybe I could just come in one day a week. There wasn’t much left to test and my QA colleagues had the new, more interesting project pretty much covered themselves. One of them was Matt Thorson who had already made games better than this one and would go on to make games much more successful than this one too, the other one was my girlfriend and she dumped me a couple weeks later so it’s probably just as well I only had to come in once a week in the end. It was probably somewhere in here that I got put on academic probation too. Anyway I quit pretty abruptly in the fall and went off to Bible school to do a religious studies program that I didn’t plan to finish and indeed didn’t finish, but it gave me an environment to shake my life out of the death spiral it had slid into. Also, come to think of it, it’s where my wife and I first crossed paths so that we could reconnect online, fall in love and get married a decade later. Which is how I come to find myself writing this in the middle of the night while she sleeps beside me and our son sleeps in the next room because, I’ve just realized, the smoke from the forest fires down south smell just like the insense the studio manager used to burn that always gave me a headache and probably contributed to the motion sickness. This isn’t a very good game but on the other hand it was also part of a very bad personal time which ultimately led me to the life I have today which I wouldn’t trade for anything. So I guess five stars for my wife and perfect baby boy, but then deduct three and a half for the flat gameplay and bland graphics.

While undoubtedly an aesthetic glow-up from its 2019 predecessor, Habroxia 2's recycling of gameplay ideas result in it failing to live up to the quality its stylistic overhaul set.

Habroxia 2 introduces both twin-stick shooting, as well as Star Fox-style branching level paths, exciting innovations to the Habroxia formula on paper. Unfortunately, the game never capitalizes on either mechanic, with both feeling more like superficial additions for the sake of differentiation, and less like natural gameplay evolution.

It's not a bad game, but with the length largely the same as the first, and copy-pasted boss encounters from the first, it feels less like Habroxia 2 and more like Habroxia: Definitive Edition. I found myself bored.

This is basically the first mario game I have ever played since the original one because I pretty much never owned a nintendo console since recently so I might not have noticed certain issues more well versed nintendo/mario fans might have had.

The 3D effect is used nicely, graphically it looks nice and colorful and I appreciate how the levels are all short but to the point experiences, its basically 100% meant for a handheld and it works.

I guess my main issue is how easy it really is, I even went for all the stars and didn't have much trouble aside from a couple of ones so a little more challenge would have been nice.