I found the Rogue-style caves to be exhausting, not necessarily in a bad way but the survival aspects made the treks feel arduous.

White and purple Pikmin are cool inclusions although the fact that they live in the ship and can only be gotten from flowers feels... sloppy?

I found a lot of the puzzles in the game to feel a bit busy worky.

I love the premise of "just find treasure we broke". The two captain system feels a bit under-utilized and the puzzles it is required for are kind of annoying?

I enjoyed this a lot while playing it but reflecting back I'm finding it to be messier than Pikmin 1 and some of the ideas feel a bit undercooked. I also thing it suffers a bit from "more is more" by the time we got our 10,000 coins (we is my obsessed four-year-old) we were pretty exhausted with the game. We enjoyed our time but didn't have much appetite left for "post-game" including any more taxing spelunking adventures.

Core Pikmin gameplay is still wonderful here but this doesn't feel like an all-timer like the first one. I'd rather that replayable 5 hour experience to this big fat 20 hour one. Still pretty happy to play through this one if nothing else just for my chunky purple buddies.

Played the PS3 version on PS5 streaming.

Couple things here:

A. PS5 streaming is maybe good now? All the games I've been trying fun pretty well. I also have a weirdly good time imagining whatever PS3 I'm remotely connecting to turning on and spinning up my game like a jukebox.

B. God this game is cool. Just concept-wise. We are gonna have a black and white modern classical music only perspective based puzzle game. And put it on that shiny PlayStation 3. Just... good stuff.

3. It's sort of cool the state this game is in now that the network is off. There are like 400 user levels that have been archived for posterity (congrats to anyone on there... I'd be bragging about that on my resume and dating site profiles) and the UI is just sort of abstract on purpose. I love this damn thing. There's a few hundred puzzles just hanging out there waiting for ya.

Wily's castle is an exercise in learning a sequence of unpleasant nonsense in order to proceed.

My playtime looked like this:

Hour 1: Blast through the 8 robot masters. Decent gameplay, cool music. Much more forgiving and fun than the first game.

Next hour and half: Search my soul and yell at my computer while I muddle through Wily's castle. I had to learn the unfun and arbitrary nonsense required to proceed. You can see that they designed things here... they just forgot to make it fun.

Before you get to Wily's castle, this game is a real improvement on the first. Once you get there, the designers seemed to remember they loved bullshit and load you up with it.

There is still something here. I like it, even though it is filled with shitty design. But no way this thing is an all-time classic. A smidge better than the first.

Ranking so far:

1. Mega Man 2
2. Mega Man

Very easy video game to pitch:
You pilot a mech and blow stuff up.

The game delivers very well on this promise, giving you lots of different ways to blow stuff up:

swords
missiles
shields
rifle
laser gun
machine gun
bazookas
grenade launchers

It also lets you be a flying mech, a fast mech, or a tank mech. You can tweak everything in between. The cusomization is the fun part.

I got sick of the campaign after 12 hours but I really enjoyed my time with the game. Might go back later and mess around some more. Just sort of perfectly delivers what it promises with incredible style.

Playing the games in order, ranking so far:

1. 0
2. 3
3. kiwami
4. kiwami 2

This game is so good. Daddy Kiryu is amazing and Okinawa is just such a fun location. I also feel like the substories are extremely fast-paced which makes them much more compelling. In other games so far, every substory takes like 5 minutes. These are quick and to the point and the ones that aren't were genuinely intriguing! It might just be that I've gotten better at appreciating Yakuza games but I had a real good time this one! Blows my mind there are 9 of these!

It's fun! It's fine! It's Mario!

The music is not good.

The levels are fun... but sort of just still Mario?

Elephant power adds a punch and the ability to water stuff. ok.

I guess I'm just a bit underwhelmed. There is fun stuff to point to, seems like a good hangout game. Unfortunately, I'm only really hanging out with myself and my 3 year old son, and as soon as he learned Nabbit doesn't get powerups he basically tossed the controller. I don't blame him!

It's on the shelf. Maybe I'm just not in the Mario mood? The game has not put me in the Mario mood? I'm having a hard time capturing my thoughts except I think it's pretty good but not amazing and I don't really want to play it.

The second of these glorious Digital Eclipse interactive documentaries, I just love this format so much.

I had no idea what Karateka was, despite being, what I thought at least, pretty well-versed in video game history and culture. So it was a real treat to see all the footage and play all the builds/prototypes to really learn about this story from scratch.

My favorite thing in the collection is a scan of a letter from John Romero to Jordan Mechner. It's just a lovely piece of history from pre-Doom Romero.

I don't really like the game! But I love this product. And honestly from a value proposition, digital movies cost $19.99. This is a movie's worth of documentary footage, plus documents, plus games, plus a remastered version of the game. It's easily worth the $19.99 and I will continue to purchase this series the second they releas.

It's a super cool game. It looks amazing, the sound design and music are incredible, and the scenario (which one can glean from reading the manual) is some good sci fi stuff.

Unfortunately I found four major flaws in the game design that I caused me to put this down after two hours.

1. You restart with only 30 energy. This means you have to grind up for energy each time. (kill enemies, grab pellet, repeat. It takes longer than you want by a lot)

2. Copy/Paste areas. Like straight up copy/paste. You will see a duplicate of a hallway. It's just not cool. I like making my own map but reusing an area wholesale is uninteresting and oppressive.

3. No door invincibility. This one is little but really annoying. You are not invincible while going through doors. Getting hit during a door transition feels really unfair.

4. Seriously antagonistic enemy placement. Walk through a door and get hit immediately... this is not good lol.

The game has a lot of promise and I'll bet there are some rom hacks that make it much more enjoyable. Gonna roll into Metroid 2 next and check out the GB sequel.

Led by the dude who designed INSIDE, which I did not like (found it to be more of a switch-pressing simulator than a puzzle game), COCOON shares DNA but is way more interesting to me.

The main concept revolves around different orbs. You carry these around to solve puzzle but the orbs themselves also contain levels. There are fascinating parts in which you nest the orbs, creating worlds within worlds within worlds. It felt similar to INSIDE in that there was little challenge, but different in that the concept was very pleasing to interact with. This is helped by the excellent feedback design. The game has very pleasing sounds and when you are solving a puzzle, the atmospheric synthetic sounds will crescendo. The haptic feedback on the Dual Sense controller was additionally perfect, providing, as it should, a real feeling of connection between game and player.

I also loved the structure of the game. Checkpoints are all at a certain % of completion and progress is displayed a traversed circumference of a circle. This made getting the Platinum trophy a simple, compelling, and pleasing experience.

I found this to be an exquisitely designed modern game, designed to demonstrate a neat concept with a beautifully comprehensive checkpoint system. Greatly enjoyed my four or so hours with this.

Tried to go back and complete the original Final Fantasy on NES.

Had a real bad time!

I was mildly enjoying the beginning but the first major fetch quest is such a miserable slog. Its not just the grind that is bad. I got no problem sinking some time into grinding. There are a several factors that led me to need to stop playing:
nonsensical magic system
hideously tedious item system
the boring plot

the mediocre music ( I'm an uematsu fan but I'm not hearing good stuff here)

the ugly aesthetic ( love Amanos work but I just don't think these pixels look good and for Real what is s the deal with red haired fighter)

The long slow stun locking/poison battles.

I actually like that your characters attacks don't carry over to other enemies as a strategic design decision but you just need to pummel too many jerks to be able to appreciate it.

Beat this back in high school and had a passable time, this go around found it intolerable!

Played this on my phone for retro achievements which worked perfectly well with my Samsung stylus.

Some of the song choices are psychedelically bad in 2023 (legit had a hard time with the 2nd to last song because the Hoobastank track was so awful) but the presentation and gameplay make up for it.

I played the pants off this game back on my DS and still hold that its one of my favorite games of all time.

Fascinating as a localization project. I've only played a bit of Ouendan but its pretty wild to completely overhaul your product for a different culture. Maybe Ouendan is even better but this is about as good as a game gets, to me.

NES version is legit good in 2023.

The simplicity allows the game to feel elegant and manageable.

Monster sprites are outstanding.

Dragon Quest's feature of keeping your exp when you die make the grind much more tolerable.