I'll be playing the entire collection at some point, and I'm usually the type to play by release order barring a few special series. Can't be understated how awful and cryptic some of the puzzles are, even when they built in a help button to one of the buttons on the controller at all times. Sometimes it's just "check literally every checkable thing you can, no hints on what it is without a guide" like finding the WWW Metro, how are you supposed to know that it's behind the school statue of all things? There's a real tendency for the game to have you go do something, then go "I need to go see dad!" and then you go to see dad and then you go exactly back to where you just were. Dentown might be the worst designed area of its type I've ever seen, to the point where my mental map failed me after 10 minutes of looking around for one objective and I looked at a map of it, and it was entirely different looking of an area than I thought it was supposed to be! It's entirely pointless backtracking because it's also entirely real world navigation, there's not even any netbattles to do. The netbattles are basically what all 4 of this 4/10's points come from. I think they're really fun but the devs clearly didn't consider what some of the enemy combinations would be like to fight while in the same fight as each other. It's real satisfying when you pull a bunch of chips at once that work together and you can pulverize your enemies. You restore HP after battle, so as long as you don't die, you won't get a game over usually. I focused on building my chip deck around the A, C, and F codes and found most of the story bosses fair and balanced. The final boss feels like a damage race at a certain point but because of how upgraded your buster is there, it makes it fine if you can tank some hits. Some of the bosses, namely Shark Man and Number Man, are godawful and I wonder how they even got put to code, and ironically, both of those are the complete opposite end of difficulty. Number Man is so easy that you just... pick the small number and shoot it, and Shark Man is RNG if your chips you picked are good enough to hit Shark Man past his 2 fake fins that block all damage and attack at a near undodgeable speed. Maybe they just expected me to constantly spam the chip that makes you invincible for a few seconds there? The plot is pretty much nothing, it's basically cartoon villain wants to destroy the world, the only wrench thrown in is right at the end with Mega Man being Lan's deceased brother, digitized. I've always heard this series had a rocky start and that 2 and 3 are actually some of the better in the series, so I'm looking forward to continuing the games even if my enjoyment of this one wasn't that great. I doubt I'll go back and fight Bass in this one, since it requires every single chip other than the one you get from him, and I doubt any generous donors online want to give me their full collections so I can fight him. Cause I'm not grinding for that. Maybe in future games I'll enjoy things far more and feel much more like going for a completion.

I'm joining the war on narrative games, and I'm on the side of narrative. Before I ever really got serious about video games, I was serious about books and film, and like those mediums it's story that piques my interest.

Undeniably, Undertale is one of the most interesting narratively-driven games of the last decade. It's probably the most I've ever played a game I did not like, having done several playthroughs, neutral or pacifist or genocide, waiting for it all to "click". But it just won't. Why not?

I'll say that I thoroughly enjoy the gameplay and think it works perfectly as an example of narrative gameplay integration, and is used consistently and intelligently throughout. But paradoxically, in a game that encourages you to avoid combat, it's these moments where the characters get the most personality; their attack patterns and even their projectiles say more about them in a language unique to this game than their dialogue ever could.

It's appropriate that this game is so strongly associated with an auteur, because even moreso than the amount of times you'll see his name pop in the credits as composer or designer or writer or caterer, it becomes very obvious very fast that this game is only really meant to appeal to one kind of person. (Well, two kinds of people. Furries also exist.)

As someone else said in their review of this game, you should indeed not let one annoying fandom ruin your perception of a game, and I wish it was as simple as ignoring Tumblr's collective opinion. The problem is that this game was only ever meant to be FOR Tumblr, or more specifically the kind of person that Tumblr has cultivated; someone who thinks a character's likeability comes from them being 'adorkable' and not any kind of dramatic pathos or arc or actual character, someone who calls dogs 'doggos' and 'puppers', someone who spends six dollars on laptop stickers that say inane phrases like "why be moody when you can shake that booty".

A difference in humor is one thing -- though I'd argue it's still justifiably off-putting, considering how much of this game is reliant on its humor, to the point of stopping gameplay dead in its tracks to dedicate time to the kind of weak character skits you see in rejected SNL auditions -- but within this setting, it is crucial that you enjoy such humor and characterization if you hope to get any kind of mileage out of the game's narrative.
Which is a shame, because the game does have some true highs; the combat system allows for an exploration of morality with some genuine weight to your actions, there's clearly been a lot of thought put into the mechanics of this world and how consequences develop throughout the story. But it's ultimately at the service of very little; you will only root for Sans if you enjoy puns, you will only care about Napstablook if you unironically have Daria as your Twitter icon, you will only care for Alphys if you are the kind of unbearable nerd who sees themselves as an anime protagonist and not, you know, a fucking annoying prick.

Differences in humor tend to be the main reason people conflict about melo-dramedy stories like BoJack Horseman or Fleabag. Because humor and drama are interwoven in these stories and end up being celebrate to making each other work, which becomes hard to breach for an audience if they just don't enjoy your chosen method of comedy (pop culture references in BoJack or fourth wall breaking in Fleabag, for example). It works for these shows because, like the humor, the drama is very personal as well. Undertale on the other hand combines very personal humor with large sweeping statements about morality, postmodernism, ludonarrative dissonance, very large lofty themes that have to co-exist with pretty braindead humor like "what if the rock wouldn't stay put, LOL".

At its most egregious it suggests a kind of ego on behalf of the creators, that there never was a true conversation about these decisions concerning the narrative, or even that there was no one around to challenge these ideas. A lot of this feels adolescent and juvenile, especially compared to its successor Deltarune, which has demonstrated far stronger capabilities of self-awareness and actual character development.

In the end, Undertale falls in line with a game like Borderlands; decent to play, but god I wish it was written by anyone else.

10-year-old me never designed a game, but if I did there's a good chance it would look somewhat like Shadow of the Beast. Plenty of cool ideas, unique enemies, enemy formations and level hazards, but they're all strung together haphazardly with little regard for balance or flow - it really does feel like someone with ADHD just designed a whole lot of unique monsters, strung together a bunch of "wouldn't it be cool if-" moments and called it a day.

Shadow of the Beast's most infamous quality is probably its difficulty, and for good reason. Many handheld games had worse screen crunch, games like Secret of Evermore had worse hit detection, and Strider in its worst moments had far more hazards onscreen at once - but this game put all those frustrating elements together on top of giving the player a grand total of zero continues. I'll admit to using the invincibility cheat, without which I would never have made it past the penultimate level - a shmup stage made way harder than it should be by your vertically-oriented hurtbox.

Perhaps the game's most offputting quirk is how it handles its non-linearity. There are certain items (keys, a wrench, a torch, etc.) you need to pick up in order to make progress, but the game is buggy enough that doing things out of order will glitch the game out and softlock you. This turns dead ends into literal dead ends and leaves basically no room for deviation or exploration.

The game's graphics, cool soundtrack and surprisingly smooth controls save it from a lower score, but it's definitely one of the weaker-designed platformers from the era.

I'm not sure what else I was expecting when I randomly decided to play a GBA game based on the National Geographic feature-length documentary March of the Penguins as narrated by Morgan Freeman.

It's just a crappy version of Lemmings. Like yeah, that makes sense? I guess I was hoping they'd go full bollocks on it, and make it a 2D platformer where you play as Mama Penguin who's out to save her kid from another dastardly mustache-twirling penguin. I think there's some decent mechanics there for a penguin-based platformer involving sliding and fast-paced swimming, perhaps you could also spit fish at enemies as a form of limited ammunition? The enemies could be leopard seals, orca whales and club-wielding poachers, the typical stuff.

Game just feels like the polar (heh) opposite of Attack of the Mutant Penguins, just very boring and zero creativity. Still funny in itself that they made games based on the documentary. Penguin mania was just runnin' wild back in the 00s I guess.