From a game I remember fondly to… a game I don’t remember at all. The next stretch of games here are almost back-to-back-to-back in terms of how often I returned to them, how representative they were of my memories frequenting Nitrome.com, and then there’s also Magneboy, which… I probably played, but certainly not enough to leave any sort of impression, especially compared to what’s around it. Not to say it doesn’t compare to them, though! This is more of a straight puzzle game compared to anything else (so far) in Nitrome’s oeuvre, but it’s neat to see just how well their tendencies translate from one genre to another. Your goal for each level is to use your power of magnetism to get from the start square to the end square, but the number of things you interact with to fulfil that end varies level by level. From tiles that you pull towards you, from tiles that you pull towards them, to tiles that create bridges across the level, to portals that you can enter and/or send blocks through, there’s a real ebb and flow to the way the game handles all its disparate mechanics. I especially like how the first level to introduce a mechanic will usually take it easy on you… then immediately throw something much harder, giving you the basics of the mechanic before asking you how that mechanic fits in with everything else in the game. It’s decently cerebral, manages to avoid the typical puzzle game trap of becoming too complicated for its own good, and that feeling when you finally realize what you’re meant to do and complete the last couple of steps in quick succession is unparalleled. It’s probably the first 50-level Nitrome game where that length… almost feels justified. I’m… a bit unsure whether this game really needed enemies/a health bar — they were often just kind of an annoyance at best and felt rather superfluous to the systems already there — but aside from that this is a solid way to spend an hour. I can’t quite remember how many more puzzle games Nitrome did after this — I don’t think they really started popping up until the year after this — but for a first-ish foray this isn’t half bad. Can’t wait to see more.

When I started this, I declared that unless anything drastic happened, it was my favourite Puyo game to date. God how that slipped by the end.


The laundry list:
- Absolutely no gameplay variety (only 1-on-1 Puyo 2 battles in adventure mode despite multiple rulesets being available in other modes)
- Very formulaic tickbox cutscenes (character has an overarching scenario which will be joked about in the first cutscene by that stage's character, said character then leaves very quickly after battle is over, no room for any development of anyone short of their assigned architype for their story mode)
- All over the place difficulty balancing (listed level is often not indicative of how hard they'll actually be because of their usage of support items, also said number decreases and increases at random anyway meaning there's no real skill curve)
- Clearly finished content being locked behind future updates (they're available to fight in the story mode being fully voiced and modeled, but only characters who have story modes are currently playable. On this note, please don't give every single playable character a story mode)
- Currently no ending in the game (I'm sure one will be patched in but to not even have an ending shows either how much of a rushjob this is or how desperately they want you to keep subscribing for the content updates in subsequent months and therefore payments)

All of this left me feeling extremely jaded with the game and honestly with Apple Arcade as a "legitimate" gaming platform in general. Great stuff has come out of it (on their final patches once the year or so of exclusivity is up mind you), but for Apple to continue to prove that they want console quality titles to be their flagships they need to ship them in a state comparable to console games. People moan about how many patches you need to do on console nowadays, but on said platforms I've never seen a game advertised as a system seller just tell you to come back for the ending in a few months time. It's ridiculous.

This game needs far more time in the oven as currently even despite the clear ambitions on show, it just isn't finished and therefore can't even begin to stack up to other far more accessible and affordable offerings in the series. Maybe in a year or so we'll see a final-ish build be shipped out to consoles and PC, but until then this isn't really worth your time, especially if you'd be going out of your way for a subscription and/or an Apple device to play it.

"Ugggh that Giygas' Lair ahh labyrinth in DL3 sucks!!!" dw, we got you covered hands you sterile Kirby game in slow motion. That is not the nicest thing to say to Super Star, though it rings kinda true sometimes. It does more right than wrong ultimately, and that's what (Dark) matters. Did you know that one bird in Meta Knight's story? His name in german, it's Käpt'n Geyer, this one is funny idk why every german word sounds like somebody cursing my bloodline tho. He really left the ship in one (1) nanosecond! Too ashamed to appear again. I gotta admit, I forgot him from when I played Super Star Ultra all those years ago. I can understand why ahah.

Super Star truly is a fun pak, indeed there's a remake of Dream's Land with abilities (KINO??) a new adventure with Dream's Land vibes and design (SOUL??), an entire gamemode for le epic Meta Knight (PEAK??), a collectibles hunting game where you find goofy shit and come back whenever you want once you've reached the end of the roaaaaad (BANGER??), Marx taking a shit in space and creating a black hole (HOLY BASED??) a racing short story where you eat unhealthy food (SLOP??!). Then the... Arena. And minigames. I feel like this section is entirely useless if you've played the game before, but yeah Milky Way Wishes is the peak and Gourmet Race is the bottom. The variety of content is setting my gyatt on fire although what I said about "better than the sum of its parts" for Dream Course applies here... less positvely.

Definitely, the best part about Super Star is a lot of abilities most having their own movesets. Quantity over quality... stfu i'm getting both!! It's no wonder Yo-Yo disappeared for a while although there must be personal beef if it took Star Allies to get this banger ability back. I also love Ninja you can go off-screen without action replay cheating... spark is so cool you can spark up and booom you release! What's also great is opening the pause menu and Kirby smiles at you and yells in caps "YOU SHOULD KILL YOURSELF...NOW!!" oh thankfully he didn't do that, he doesn't warn you that bosses are gonna be bangers though so that's definitely the 2nd best part since Kirby games don't have a good track record in their first decade in the gamingsphere.

It sounds like I'm describing a game with a higher rating and clicked on a completely different game's logs, when I am in fact just not feeling it. I've played co-op, cool time with bestie but I might just be struggling to feel anything after being used to the DS one. I don't remember the control scheme being this wacky for starters. The graphics are kinda yucky compared to like, every other Kirby game that ever Kirby'd ngl. He looks like he's on the bus home from Harvard. He no pursu higher education bcuz time for studying = less time for eating ppl ! !

I've had to let this one stew for a bit, honestly.

I picked it up for myself as a late birthday present out of curiosity more than anything. I'd heard a lot of unflattering comparisons to Vampire Survivors (a game I very much despise) and clicker games (which I also despise! Wow, patterns!) which had put me on edge, so I was a little surprised to find out that none of those comparisons are apt.

I can understand being skeeved out by the direct usage of Poker iconography and terminology on display, but the truth that's apparent to me is that Balatro is ultimately another roguelike deckbuilder. You match symbols together, try to play to synergies, and pray for one of your random drops/powerups to be the one that enables a certain playstyle or tactics. If anything, despite my relative apathy towards deckbuilders (I play YGO, so slapping a roguelite aspect on just repels me) I admire this game for its honesty and relative lack of illusions.

Still, I find myself in an odd position.

Despite admiring it, I'm not really smitten with it.

One of those games where I can see why it's considered a mindmelting trap for people with ADHD, but I personally don't get much out of it. Would honestly rather play Suika Game. Incremental micro-unlocks and "pick one of 3" powerups and glorified slot machines in the form of card packs don't really enthuse me.

At a base level, the basest of all levels, I do think the mechanics are somewhat engaging despite the simplicity and comparison to blackjack more than poker. Compared to its contemporaries I also think it has infinitely more impactful decision making, especially with how finite money is and how little shops actually offer.
But Balatro - and indeed, nearly the entire roguelite genre - has an awful habit of playing their entire mechanical hand early on and then hoping it's enough to hook you. While it works for some games (Isaac, FTL, Dead Cells, Synthetik) I don't find it works so well for deckbuilders. There aren't enough interesting twists on the core mechanics for me to want to keep playing, and if anything its iconographical honesty might actually make it worse.

Sure, the game is addictive, but I'm older now dude. I creak when I wake up, I say "Mmm scrumptious" when I buy a pastry from Greggs, I tend a garden, I play Granblue Fantasy, I've got an inanimate object I collect.

'Addictive' is no longer enough to satisfy me. Life is addictive, pastries are addictive, math is addictive, the world I live in is addictive.

[Semi-related ramble that I was gonna post as a comment on someone else's Balatro review before remembering I don't like to barge into other people's posts and go "Nuh uh".]

I so direly wish higher profile indie games would have a design core that isn't just "addictive". Having seen roguelites come into existence over a decade ago, it feels like every other popular indie game is trying to make players chase the same kind of high that Binding of Isaac or FTL did all those years ago. In turn, they miss out on just being good games at their core.

Fucked up that Hitman: Freelancer is the best of these games I've played in years, and it was free DLC.

"Curiosity killed the uncool cat, ya dig?" - Chad Ghostal

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a first-person horror game where your character wakes up in an abandoned building and has to solve paint-by-numbers puzzles while armed with a flashlight that has limited battery power.

In Sound Mind makes a poor first impression, its opening oddly lifeless for a game touting the collaboration of The Living Tombstone and presenting itself with psychedelic cover art. However, as I got my bearings in its first hour, hunting down a cassette tape that would whisk me away to its first proper level, I remained hopeful that the game would make good on its promise. I pet my cat before I left and got a trophy, "GOTY 10/10." Bad sign.

Protagonist Desmond Wales is as poor a therapist as he is a pet owner, inviting poisonous plants into his home and staring out the window while his patients doom spiral. Now you have to repair their broken psyches and give them closure while unraveling a conspiracy involving the highly psychoactive drug Agent Rainbow, which led to their deaths. What this means from a gameplay perspective is that each level centers around a specific patient in a location pertinent to them, such as... an abandoned grocery store. An abandoned lighthouse. An abandoned factory. An abandoned military base. This may all be the doing of Agent Rainbow, but each of these locations are drab, downright colorless both in aesthetic and flavor, occupied only by cookie-cutter enemies (of which there are three variants through the whole game) and uninspired puzzles.

Desmond's patients also haunt their respective levels, having mutated after succumbing to their inner-demons. You can't just shoot them like your typical fodder-type enemies and will need to employ more inventive methods to counteract them, with most of these encounters doubling as a means to solve environmental puzzles, like luring Max Nygaard - now a disembodied mechanical bull head - into breakable walls.

The problem is that much like all the other puzzles you run into, once the solution has been presented to you, you're expected to repeat it ad infinitum. Shining a light to scare away Allen Shore (nice Alan Wake reference) loses all its tension when you find yourself doing it a dozen different times, never once iterating on the mechanic after its introduction. The third level has you ferrying three CPUs between power panels to unlock doors, and by that point I became conditioned enough to know that would be my main method of progression through the next two hours of game. Everything you're tasked with feels like it was written out for you on a torn piece of notebook paper and stuck to the fridge, just a list of chores no more engaging than taking out the trash.

Speaking of trash: this game's performance. Something about open environments is incredibly disagreeable with the framerate, and unfortunately most of In Sound Mind takes place outdoors, so the game is constantly choking to death. It also has a tendency to checkpoint you in the middle of hazards, nearly locking me in a death loop once as I was stuck respawning on top of a toxic puddle while getting hit by an enemy with 30% of my HP remaining. I managed to wriggle my way out of that after multiple attempts, despawn the mob, and then ate a candy bar which made Desmond go "Nom~" in a cutesy voice. Almost shut the game off there.

And I wish I had, because In Sound Mind's technical problems ultimately resulted in the game becoming unbeatable. During the last leg of the final boss, all objects became non-interactive, something that permeated through several earlier saves and which could not be resolved by restarting the app or the console. Just locking me minutes from rolling credits, something it could've had the decency to do hours earlier. I don't normally rate games I abandon, but considering the conditions under which I did and how close I was at the end, I'm comfortable giving this a 1/5. Would've clocked it at a 2/5 before that.

We Create Stuff is an aptly named studio, because "stuff" is such a vague, "whatever" term for an end product that there's no promise of it being worthwhile. In Sound Mind is just that, a cobbled together collection of rote design elements scraped off the bottom of the first-person horror barrel, served up with no imagination, neither invested in saying anything or being fun, it's just stuff. Great job, guys.

no game this pretty should have to suffer from writing THIS bad. i don't like to be too hyperbolic, i love video games and i just wanna be chill about em, but Solar Ash has some of the most aggravating writing i've experienced in a game. the core appeal here, to me, is getting to effortlessly glide around gorgeous landscapes and soak in the atmosphere - but your protagonist NEVER shuts the fuck up!!!! you'll see a glowing red eye on a goop obstacle and she'll blurt out "that must be its weak point! i should attack it!". the game constantly patronizes the player with obnoxious hand-holding quips, the tone of which never really matches the world's. there's an area with hazardous green acid that causes a vignette and a warning indicator to appear on screen - obviously, that isn't obvious enough of an indicator of danger so she says "Even the water here is hazardous, because... of course it is."

Hyper Light Drifter managed to have an interesting world without any dialogue. it's strange to see how much of an emphasis this game places on story, with a fair amount of sidequest NPCs and text logs that no human being has ever read. a lot of its meat ends up being exposition and a stream of meaningless sci-fi proper nouns. the back end of its narrative has that YA-fiction blatant stating of themes in an attempt to be about 'something.' the final boss is the manifestation of the protagonists' self-hatred and guilt that gets defeated by reaching out to others, i couldn't help but groan.

part of me thinks this game's focus on story is more a reflection of how empty the rest of it is. a lot of its systems seem entirely superfluous - health points never matter (why can you even take damage?), the only thing you can spend currency on is on getting more health, you can collect more suits but they have a negligible effect on gameplay. there's a lot of time spent on boss fights but all of them play the exact same way - you home in on a bit, glide around hitting little needle things, and then home in on their eye. it's fun the first couple of times but gets repetitive. for a roughly 5-6 hour game, a lot of it feels like filler. it never stops looking gorgeous, it never stops being fun to skate around in its world (tho i disagree with how its momentum is so easy to lose & never really builds in a tactile sense), but i wish it was designed tighter. and that whoever wrote it is never allowed to communicate in any language ever again.

This is a game where a bunch of talented developers were stuck in the same room for two years who were never told "no." Instead, they told each other "sure, bro."

Want to make a bunch of new mechanics that are both overcentralizing and near-irrelevant? Sure, bro.

Want to make a 30-60 minute long tutorial you can only skip by winning a race you only can win if you already know how to play the game somehow? Sure, bro.
(Don't even get me started on how the tutorial was before the first patch, the requirements to skip the tutorial were hidden AND you had to clear a max-level race. Actually evil.)

Want to generally nerf items while cranking the knockback to unfathomable degrees which creates scenarios where you can get knocked out of a top position and no item is reasonably strong enough to get you back where you were? Sure, bro.

Want to make items actively feel bad to get because the Ring system is so encouraged while also not letting you use Rings with an item in hand? Sure, bro.

Want to make like 200 tracks but they all have narrow tracks and very tight turns? Sure, bro. Also want to make any uphill slope kill your speed and make you have to STOP IN PLACE to Spin Dash upward VERY SLOWLY? Sure, bro.

Want to make a single player mode where the rubberbanding is overtuned (even after a near launch day nerf, mind you), the AIs will target you even when you're near dead-last, and the Rival explicitly cheats and will steal victories from you? Sure, bro.

Want to make an unlock system like Kirby Air Ride but make a bunch of requirements hard, cryptic, and/or straight up unrealistic to achieve unless you dedicate literal months of game time? Suuuuure, bro.

Despite its many, MANY problems, the game is still fun and I can see a version of this game where the new additions compliment base SRB2K rather than detract. The Rings being the omnipresent, overbearing problem is an issue I don't see being fixed, though. The devs seem really proud of their Ring system even if it kills the Kart aspect by making items less used/encouraged. I can always hope, though.

tl;dr Imagine if Mario Kart was mixed with F-Zero but all the worst parts of F-Zero were mixed in with a dash of unique jank and bad decisions. Enjoyable for kart-racer tryhards, completionists, and masochists, and nobody else.

What I can never fault Ring Racers for is its ambition. Its environments are lovely, well realized, and expand on familiar Sonic zones and trappings in a way that accentuates every single track. It's a mechanically rich game with a bunch of different systems to compensate for every idea it has. It loads you with objectives and a glut of content that is mind boggling to begin to tackle. In all senses, it is a love letter to the legacy of Sonic and the fan game community that has sprung up around him, and takes every opportunity to remind you of its fan game status that it absolutely relishes. As a celebration and collection, Ring Racers is absolutely sublime.

Getting there tends to be the trickier issue. Much has been said about the game's intro, and while I find the dialogue and overall presentation of the tutorial very charming, I do find it a very misguided intro to the game. The mechanics taught in the tutorial are often used very sparingly across the actual races, and even those used often like drifting are used in different, shorter-form contexts than the tutorial would imply. It practically posits Ring Racers as an entirely different game and experience compared to what it actually is, and it goes on doing that for quite a while!

The actual races themselves vary in quality drastically depending on the track layout. Ring Racers can be absolutely vicious with its track designs, with hazards feeling devastating as they can easily combo into other hazards or items that toss you around like a pinball. This can be DEVASTATING on slopes, which require Sonic's vaunted momentum to get up and are aided by the ring system, letting you increase your speed a little bit per ring used. This should present some level of risk/reward; do you use your rings on straightaways to burst ahead, or save them for slopes as a means of recovery to maintain position? Unfortunately, rings are plentiful to a fault, and computer opponents (ESPECIALLY your rival character) are want to use them whenever possible to ludicrous speed increases, so rings become less strategic unless you're specifically saving them for chaos emerald bonuses in Grand Prix standings and more "I hope this part of the track also has rings". And when it doesn't... well you have the spin dash to get you out of the worst of things, but it feels pretty rough.

Drifting is also highly committal compared to rings, meaning that all alternate forms of speed are just kinda secondary to the immediate allure of the rings, which do not have enough risk to them to make the immediate reward not always a pull. This is compounded by items, which use the same button as using rings and, thus, often get in the way of progress more often than they help, especially considering how avoidable most offensive items tend to be as they struggle to interact with the steep sloped terrain of Ring Racers! I feel that individual race courses struggle to decide if they want to play nice with Ring Racers' systems or want to struggle against them, and very few of them are properly in line with the expectations set by the tutorial. It makes for a very uneven experience where a single bad spill on the last lap is both really debilitating and could not be entirely your fault, with means of consistent recovery not entirely present as opponents can keep padding their lead with rings and the comeback items are either unweildy to use, especially in a bad headspace, or inaccurate.

There are moments where Ring Racers does put everything together. Zones like Emerald Coast, Withering Chateau, Opulence, Regal Ruin, and Joypolis show DRRR at its best, with a consistent sense of flow, opportunities to best use shortcuts, and a great feel for combining the drift and ring mechanics. But for every one of them, there's a Marble Garden just asking for the player to try and break it in two before it breaks them. It lacks the kindness of kart racers like Mario, fails to commit to its individual mechanics like F-Zero, and does not string its systems together in nearly as seamless away as Crash, Diddy Kong, or even other Sonic racing titles manage. Ring Racers is its own, unforgiving beast that I can't say I had a bad time with, but it feels a bit overtuned for all it wants to strive for; a love letter that needed an editor, but how do you say "turn down the passion?" I like and respect it, I'll come back to keep pecking away at its wide breadth of content. But man I STILL haven't unlocked Whisper and don't even have a clue on how to get her, and I sincerely hope she's in the character class I like otherwise I'm gonna be real sad.

This game taught me the word 'fuck.'

I first played Scarface: The World Is Yours on the PS2 at age 8, and I have memories of shocked guests (except for the one cool uncle who knew the movie) watching this kid play a game that yelled the F-word every 5 seconds. I have never finished this game, and I never will. I've tried a few times (a couple of years after my parents finally took away the PS2 version's disc, I burned this game onto a blank DVD to play it again), but after another day of giving it the old college try, I'm done.

It's incredible how our child selves overlooked flaws because we were just happy to have games to play. I used to think Scarface was a better GTA game than the actual GTAs, because you could go into buildings and have conversations with NPCs on the street and do vehicular combat and piss in trash cans and swim (I wasn't aware San Andreas had swimming).

Playing it as a grown man, I can see how shallow Scarface: The World Is Yours really is. If there was ever an AI-generated video game, this is what it would look like. Most of the aforementioned conversations are just you and an NPC speaking random lines at each other; the missions are repetitive and require grinding of randomly generated sidequests before you get a crumb of story; the world is designed to be faithful to the setting rather than fun to navigate. Almost all back streets have dead ends, and cars can't climb over anything. Forcing the player to stay on the road makes car chases a bore and evading the police a chore.

It's all very faithful to the movie, to a fault. The game quotes the film's classic lines into memehood. Tony Montana feels like a cartoon with Alzheimer's disease as his monologues are lifted wholesale from the film to be re-dubbed here by an impressive soundalike - Al Pacino couldn't reprise his role after one too many cigars.

If you do want to check out this curiosity piece, try the PS2 version. The PC port is bad and buggy. You've probably seen the famous glitch where Tony's head isn't attached to his body if you're playing on anything newer than Windows XP. Sometimes you're forced to restart missions because the vehicle required to do them doesn't spawn. The graphics miss details that were present in the PS2 version, such as Tony's jacket getting soaked with blood as he takes damage. I played this game with a fan-made 'remastered' patch, plus half a dozen other fixes duct-taped together to give the fucking thing controller support and better performance. It still wasn't very good.

There was more effort put into Scarface: The World Is Yours than most licensed games, but it's no Batman: Arkham City. It has a lot to do, but it makes you do it so often it gets tiresome. It hastily rewrites the ending to one of my favourite films, and proves that being in a licensed game is a fate worse than death. I will always be somewhat fond of this game because of the childhood memories, but now the rose-tinted aviator sunglasses are off.

Manolo, choot this piece of chit.

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 straight up improvement in every regard from its predecessors, PaRappa 2 easily lands its place as the best game of the trilogy. I love a lot of the PlayStation 2’s early offerings as they almost represent the end of an era, back when short, sub-20 hour games were commonplace in your console library alongside your 40+ hour behemoths. In less than two hours I finished the main game while having pure groove injected into my veins. The game overall just strikes that specific hip-hop chord for me especially compared to the first game. I’m also happy to say that PaRappa 2 unironically has great gameplay! It’s extremely easy on the default difficulty but I love the looseness of the freestyle system and the input interpreter feels just right. This is a fantastic game, emblematic of my favorite era of games and the attitude surrounding their development. It’s short, fun, and worth your time. Play this!

BUT I HAVE JUST ONE LITTLE PROBLEM... I'M ALREADY DEAD MYSELF
You ever hear about a good game? A really good game? Everyone gushes about it, so you go in with high exceptions, only to have them blown into fucking outer space. That was me and Ghost Trick. The puzzles were really creative and yet, I only ever needed a walkthrough once. The story, my god, THE STORY!! It's a masterwork of plot strains all webbed together to create a captivating mystery that had me scratching my head, laughing my ass off, and crying my eyes out. Those last two are helped along by incredibly well written characters, Sissel, Lynne, Jowd, Cabanela, motherfucking MISSILE, all them will be living rent free in my head for years to come. I truly loved every second of this game, the worst part is that I'll never get to play it for the first time again.

I would like to thank @duhnuhnuh for gifting me this game, as a part of their massive Steam Key giveaway, and I’d recommend checking it out if you’d like to try some games out for the cost of absolutely nothing.

Shantae and the Seven Sirens is sure the fifth video game entry in the Shantae video game series released on video game consoles in 2020.

Going back a few years, Shantae and the Seven Sirens feels bizarre. It entered development around March 2018-ish, and was revealed about a year later, simply as Shantae 5. It was somewhat exciting to me, as someone who hadn't played a Shantae game yet but was definitely interested in the series. I grew up watching the Shantae Pirate’s Curse commercials on the 3DS, so I knew all of the characters, and I also heard that FUCKING MUSIC! But fast-forward a few months, it was eventually revealed that it would be a timed Apple Arcade exclusive, and I think the Shantae fans died a little inside, but rest assured, the game was fully released… to no avail! I had genuinely not seen anybody talk about the new game. The Steam reception seemed positive, the Metacritic scores were solid, so what happened? It wasn't until my Summer of 2022 Shantae binge that I would beat and finish almost every game in the series, save for two. Shantae (the first one), because of a crash that was seemingly exclusive to Switch and 3DS, and Seven Sirens, and by god. I could tell why this game went under the radar. It was really… meh, for the lack of a better term. I had only played till about the first zone, but the game really lacked the fun factor of Pirate’s Curse, nor did it have the phenomenal level design of Half Genie Hero,and overall, it was just really fucking easy. Over a year later after release though, the game received a brand new update which gave it a Definitive Mode alongside 3 other modes, which was nice, although it also released to basically no fanfare. Did every Shantae fan just… disappear between 2018 and then? I wasn't aware of the new update as I was using a less than legal copy, but now that I have the Steam version, it's time to give the game another look. With the Definitive Mode, is Shantae and the Seven Sirens a worthwhile package? Or does it give me scurvy? The biggest issue is it’s lack of risk taking with the tried-and true Shantae formula, unlike the previous 3 games, making it feel very by the numbers as yet another entry in the Shantae franchise. And none of the games have felt so... generic before. Let’s pop open the hatch, and see why Seven Sirens is so disappointing (to me, at least).

Right off the bat, I do have a few praises regarding how WayForward implemented these 4 new game modes. While the Definitive Mode takes precedence over the Legacy Mode, if you wish, you can also revert to the Legacy Mode on a save by save basis, which is pretty nice. But also, another negative right off the bat. The graphics. I don’t like em, never have and never will; hell, I’ll goes as far as to say that the aesthetics are fundamentally flawed. A majority of this game’s graphics are follow the style of Half Genie Hero, but there’s a big issue with how the game is presented. Half Genie Hero was a beautiful game, being presented in the 2.5D art style that looked incredible on the eyes. The background had so many layers, the models were high quality, it was a really pretty looking indie game. Compare this screenshot to this one from Seven Sirens and the problem should be immediately apparent. Seven Sirens is presented in a 2D plain, and it looks flatter than my man boobs, not to mention the occasional model in the overworld which just looks out of place, like the many plants you’ll find. The cutscenes are the strongest visual aspect to the game. Studio Trigger animated the intro to the game, and it looks great. It's a bit too general for my tastes, as Risky really isn't a major part of the story, but it still looks frantic and fun overall. The in-game cutscenes aren't as fast paced as the first, but it still looks okay to me. But aside from the in-game cutscenes, it just doesn’t look appealing to me, akin to how the soundtrack never caught my ears.

You can really feel the loss of Jake Kaufman in the sound department here. The soundtrack of each individual Shantae game has been mostly solid, maybe save for the first game, but at least that released on GBC, and the compositions were actually pretty catchy. The composition team behind Seven Sirens was lead by Professor Sakamoto, and a variety of composer contributed to the soundtrack. But, what happened here??? All of it takes a chiptune-esque approach, which is fine (albeit odd for a hand-drawn graphic platformer), but it simply doesn’t sound memorable, nor really all that good. There’s a few decent songs here and there, but for the most part, the music is just… noise. No cohesion or anything., just… music… It’s easily my least favorite soundtrack in the entire series, and I really hope they can clap back with Advance.

When it comes to the game itself, it’s... odd to say the least, at least when it comes to progression and structure. Classic Shantae (2000 and Risky’s Revenge) had a big open map, while the Modern Games (Pirate’s Curse and Half Genie Hero) had much smaller, multiple maps. Sure, Half Genie Hero made it a level-by-level structure, but you still had to use your abilities to explore through to progress. It worked, although it was awkward at times to backtrack. Seven Sirens returns to the Classic Shantae style while also mixing in Modern Shantae, to somewhat mediocre results. Unlike previous Shantae games which had you use your abilities to progress, Shantae and the Seven Sirens opted for a more “find x item, bring it to here” design. It’s not terrible, but a part of me really missed the more character based progression of the previous games. It gave you an “Aha!” moment, but Seven Sirens doesn’t really do that all too well. At best, I really felt a sense of satisfaction that I was at least making progress, but what game fails at that? Maybe it’s because the abilities themselves... kind of suck.

Seven Sirens attempts to integrate the animals into your moveset, but it doesn’t really feel as great at how Pirate’s Curse did it. In Pirate’s Curse, you were always using all of your abilities at once. Not because you necessarily had to, but it was really fun to do so, and most of the level design in that game encouraged that. Big, flat open plain with a bunch of enemies you don't want to deal with? Annihilate their asses with the Dash. Seven Sirens, on the other hand, fails at this. I really only enjoyed the Newt Dash. The rest are kind of okay. You use them to progress. That’s it. No practical uses outside of combat, like Elephant, or Monkey from the classic games. But, if Shantae is a belly dancing genie, watt about her dances though? So… the dances. They’re all pretty annoying. Not only do they eat up your magic, meaning players going for the most combat-positive upgrades are essentially shot in the foot. But the dances themselves are really, really boring. Shantae uses an element, changes something in the current room, get the thing you need, move on. Needless to say. It’s not FUN. It’s so boring, like, is this REALLY the best you could do? What if the transformations changed your player character, but they all have different movesets which provide individual benefits? As it stands, the current system, it’s really not all that great.

As for the level design… it’s just your average Metroidvania level design. Well, what’s the issue? It’s JUST your average Metroidvania level design. Enemies are present in the map, everything connects together, use ability (without any inherent satisfaction to be had as it’s the most predictable thing you can fucking imagine), move on. Seriously, what happened to the level design in between Half Genie Hero and Seven Sirens? The levels aren’t dynamic at all, and not even the fucking enemies are different. It’s just so… AVERAGE. Ugh. At least the enemies are occasionally fun to fight, but good lord. Not to mention the multi-staged fetch quests throughout Paradise Island. Shantae’s fetch quests, at least since Pirate’s Curse, have been pretty reserved. Usually you have to return to an area only once, rarely twice, and never again. And it was actually fun, since all of your abilities were awesome to use, complimenting the previous level design. Sure, Half-Genie Hero wasn't as great in this aspect, as the animals weren't integrated into your moves, but at the very least you had the teleport dance, as well as less backtracking in general. Seven Sirens is absolutely loaded with this, but unlike Pirate’s Curse, the moveset is just too unviable for general use. There's a few more than Pirate’s Curse, but once again, they're not all for general use. The best out of the few is easily the triple jump and dash. The rest are just awkwardly bad. The shell is too unwieldy for general platforming, and hitting a big enough enemy completely stops it. It's thankfully manually charged, unlike Pirate's Curse, which was a bit finicky, but it's still eclipsed by the Pirate's Curse dash. And the Drill and Frog just kinda… sucked. They're just too slow and tedious, good lord. That's the best way to describe this game. It's not doing anything innovative, just existing half of the time. And it infuriates me. There needs to be a case study on how Seven Sirens fails at competent modern Metroidvania design. Rather than expressing its level design through your own player character, it remains stagnant by only requiring the bare minimum of you, leaving it as the least engaging of the centrilogy, soon to be hexology. Advance better not have these problems, because this game is severely lacking in the fun factor of the previous games.

But why are we traveling through this big, open world, gaining new abilities and rescuing these half-naked women? Well, look no further than the plot. Shantae and her friends are invited to “Paradise Island” (seriously???), an island filled with sunshine non-stop. It's here where Shantae meets four other Half Genies, as a plot point established in the first game; Plink, the smallest one, Vera, the best one, Zapple, the strong one, Filin, obviously Rottytops, and Harmony, the tallest one, holy shit. All of them get ready for a massive Half-Genie Festival, but on the night of the festival, all of the genies (sparing Shantae) disappear. Determined to find answers, Shantae explores all throughout Paradise Island in search of the Half-Genies. Risky Boots is encountered but denies any foul-play at hand The Half-Genies and even the bosses themselves are pretty one-note for the most part. It's about as video-gamey as plot structure gets. Find Half-Genie, kill Siren, bam, onto the next thing. Oh, but surprise surprise, Risky Boots was behind the entire thing!!! Well, partially at least. Because the Empress Siren made a deal with Risky if Risky kidnapped the 5 Half-Genies. Soooo… yeah. Almost entirely Risky’s fault. But here’s the thing. If Risky wanted to kidnap the genies, how in the HELL did she not take notice to Shantae? Shantae is Risky's arch nemesis; she’s SEEN Shantae do her genie moves in previous games. Why only leave Shantae? Why not kidnap them all? Sure, It’d be overkill, but nobody else would be able to rescue the Half Genes, let alone Rottytops and friends while they’re lazing about. Oh, and the Empress Siren? She just feeds off of the Genies to survive because Harmony’s mother placed a spell on her. Then she practically kills Risky, and then plans to become immortal by taking everyone’s life force. They fight, a shitty boss battle occurs- WAIT.

I’m completely with Yuzrnaime on this, the fights are genuinely TERRIBLE. Not only do they have an UNHEALTHY amount of HP, a majority of them sped long periods of time in invulnerability. IT’S GENUINELY IRRITATING. I’d type out a long ass rant, but I’m writing this at 2AM. Bitch, PLEASE. But once you kill Empress, she dies, Risky comes back, Shantae and friends leave, the end. Sweet dreams.

Seven Sirens is certainly one of the most disappointing games I've ever played through. As a follow up to the two best entries in the series, it really falters. It's a game with 80% hot air in between it's content, succeeding at almost nothing it does in the remaining 20%. I didn't feel terribly angry while playing, just mildly annoyed. Shantae's abilities? Occasionally fun, but mostly annoying. The world map? Generic and mostly annoying. The dungeon designs? Among the worst in the series for simply how annoying they are. The bosses? Padded out and annoying. The music? Bland, and more importantly, annoying. I left Seven Sirens mostly ambivalent to its content, no desire to really play it, but most importantly, annoyed. I feel annoyed at this game's very existence. Not angry. Simply. Annoyed.

!!! MOVE OVER GAMERS, WE GOTTA GET THIS REVIEW OUT BEFORE CHRISTMAS !!!

You want to know the funniest thing about being a kid? It’s being ignorant to the fact that some things are just horseshit, and boy was kid me quite the ignoramus. Revisiting this game, it’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting myself into but there was some sick part of me that wanted to relive a good moment of my life in the one Spyro game I have the most unblurry memories of.

Well it turns out, those memories end at the 2nd level and nothing beyond it. Even the borderline racist NPCs somehow scrubbed from my mind. There’s no shot I finished this as a kid, and my memories kept the better portion of the game in stasis forever. They’re not good levels per se, just functionally better. After that the game quickly hurtles closer towards dystopia the further you get into it. To put it quite bluntly, this game is just not finished and couldn’t be more of a beacon of developmental hell. Except this was from the PS2/Gamecube era back in 2002 and.. yeah folks, crunch and corporate shenanigans have been happening our entire lives. This shit was made in the same time it takes to grow a human fetus and still somehow ended up being more of a disappointment.

With vast levels that are emptier than corn fields and enemies with zero life put into them. There’s no variety to be seen, just small ranged dinosaur and big dinosaur who make this sound when you murder them. If this game has achieved anything, it’s that it is at the very least sometimes funny. But you won’t be laughing when the camera 360 no scopes itself into the wall of the level design, launching you off the platform that you’re currently standing on. On normal hardware this game runs like it’s being squeezed through a tube, but even while playing it through unscrupulous means there still feels like there’s some sort of wind resistance pushing against Spyro as he charges. He feels like he weighs a metric ton, which makes platforming a goddamn nightmare. If that’s not enough for you, throw in some magic floors that clip through your body, and mini-games made by Satan himself. The draw distance is abysmal. You want to go on your cozy little gem collectathon, but they removed Sparx’s little hint clues which means you’ll be scouring all of these gigantic levels for much longer than you want just for that one last gem to appear out of thin air because it glitched out the first time. It's actually a marvel of achievement that speedrunners were able to figure out how to beat this game in 1 minute, the amount of time it takes for the veil of nostalgia to be sucked from your eyes.

What’s it all for, you may ask? Well, some of the most weirdly named Dragonflies I could have ever imagined. They really just pulled from anywhere with these guys. “Hey, it’s Karen!!” Spyro says, but the subtitle says “Rhett.” I can’t believe my childhood hero Spyro just deadnamed that dragonfly. And like I said, these issues get more prevalent as the game keeps going. With each level, the more unfinished it feels. The worlds get emptier with more nonsensical tasks that barely function. Assets aren’t re-used, but still uninspiringly pulled from previous titles in an effort to save time. Unlockable powers that get used less and less, voice lines completely missing in some instances, etc., etc. It all culminates into a final boss fight that not even I could foresee. A baffling affront to God himself, just a gauntlet of atrocities deep fried through the Christmas deadline conveyor belt. Spyro died and we killed him.

Keep this game dead, do not “reignite” it. There is no redemption to be had. Lock this one in the vault and treat it like a lesson. One day you too could make your own Enter The Dragonfly, and you don’t want to be that guy. Sometimes things should be left as memories in our heads, never to be revisited. This is a ghost for a reason, so fear it.

Now for the end of this review, I feel like it’d be only fitting to just stop talking in the middle of my