I was genuinely, pleasantly surprised by this game. I always heard that this game was looked down to a degree for “chasing after a slice of that Resident Evil pie”, but I feel like it carves out its own niche, worthy of standing tall on its own merits.

The game looks fantastic for a PS1 game. Mutants are disgustingly distinct, humans look nice and believable, and the pre-rendered backdrops are slick.

Coming off PE1, it took me a hot minute to get used to the tank controls, but it did feel natural after a while. The inventory system was still my biggest problem though. While we did get “key items” (so they wouldn’t clog up valuable inventory slots), your inventory will still be filled up extremely quickly, and be full constantly. All the guns you collect feel nice and distinct, your parasite powers are fun and intuitive to use, and it’s still fun to dodge and weave around mutants (in a different way).

The story does feel like a step down from PE1, but at this point they didn’t really have a novel/movie to lead off of, so I don’t mind the originality. Feels more like B-movie sci-fi/horror action. I'm also a big fan of inspecting literally everything in an area to get an idea of my main character's mindset, and I really enjoyed reading all of Aya Brea's thoughts on her surroundings.

My biggest complaint would have to be the music. It basically consists entirely of ambient noises and atmospheric nothing-sounds. I guess it makes sense considering the tone they were going for, but I still consider it a massive step down from Yoko Shimomura’s memorable, haunting melodies from the previous game.

Overall, I’d recommend this game if you haven’t played it. Definitely underrated.

I got this game on clearance for $15, dumped my copy to my PC, patched the censored content back in, and played it on official hardware.

I'll give credit to the game where it deserves it; The music is high-quality J-pop/J-rock. The game's character designs are cute. The art is colorful and really pops, style is not a problem with this game. Alright, time to rip off the bandaid.

I don't like this game.

All the characters are predictable, uninteresting anime tropes. Your main characters's head is empty, it's not that just that he has basically no personailty of defining traits, he also doesn't use his fucking brain. The "Performas" and villains are based off of characters from Fire Emblem (mostly Awakening), and they're very one-dimensional as well. I could see that being an intentional choice for them (as crossover characters), but it makes for a cast with zero identity.

The combat seems unique at first, but it begins to feel extremely repetitive really quickly. Most of the optional quests are the barebones "defeat this enemy x times" or "go get me x items". All of the loading screens take about 10-15 seconds, and it slows the pace down severely. It all culminates in a battle system that just feels tiresome.

The dungeons are visually distinct, but they don't feel intuitively designed in the slightest. I only got to the third dungeon before I couldn't take it anymore.

Typically, "weeaboo garbage" is right up my alley, but this game encapsulates everything I don't like about that kinda stuff. The game's all style, no substance, and substance is what I believe is actually supposed to keep you going in an RPG. Don't waste your time on this one, like I did.

(The censorship of various content is another reason to avoid this game, but if I went into detail about what was censored, this review would be more like a light novel in terms of length. It's also not too difficult to reverse the changes via hacking on the Wii U version of the game.)

I didn't know quite what to expect with this one, and not only did it effortlessly surpass the first Ace Attorney Investigations, but it stands as an extremely strong entry into the Ace Attorney franchise in general.

One of the major qualities that sets this game apart from others is that all of the cases take place over several in-game days, creating a continuity of sorts (as opposed to other AA games, where the cases tend to all be self-contained).

The other quality I really enjoy is how it never dwells too long on either half of the game. "Investigation" segments never outstay their welcome, and Edgeworth doesn't need to be in a courtroom to hear out people's testimonies. The addition of "Logic Chess" also fits Edgeworth perfectly, and was a really fun addition to investigations. The game always keeps an excellent pace. In that regard, I was never bored.

If you're an Ace Attorney fan and you haven't played this title, you owe it to yourself to obtain a copy of the game and patch in the fan-translation. The quality work that the team did makes it feel near-indistinguishable from an official localization from Capcom.

Memorable music, memorable cases, memorable characters, memorable...Edgeworth.

Short and sweet are the words of the day.

A fairly short Metroidvania game with extremely nice pixel art and wonderful atmospheric music.

It controls really well, and is fun to explore. I'm not sure what else to say, really...it's good though.

While it may look like one, this game sells itself as an action-platformer, NOT a Metroidvania, and I feel like the former definitely describes the game more accurately. You can explore off the beaten path, but most of your rewards will be purely cosmetic hats, or money for the game's fairly small selection of upgrades. It doesn't track you on completion percentage or anything either.

The game's got a really nice style to it. All the people/NPCs are robots made of old technology, the monochromatic pixel art is really cool, and the music gives off a sick ancient Japan/electronic vibe. The dialogue and area names mostly consist of technology/geek jokes, and put quite a few smirks on my face.

The game controls pretty damn well. I wish you had more control over where you shot your kunai out, but it's still fairly intuitive, and really fun to just swing around. Enemy variety is pretty good, but some are a bit obnoxious. I particularly feel like the bosses ought to have a checkpoint halfway through. Dying during a few of them often sets you back quite a bit.

Still, despite the gripes I have, I still really enjoyed this title. Solid action-platformer that's worth your time and money.

Lemme start by setting the record straight: I feel that this game is a "kusoge", or "shit game" in English. That title does carry some merit to it though; The game itself is usually pretty bad, but there's a certain charm that draws you to it, where you can enjoy it despite its low quality. Gun Gun Pixies is my kinda kusoge.

Imagine, if you will, a cross between Mister Mosquito and Chibi-Robo: Plug Into Adventure, but significantly hornier. (Since that explanation makes no sense, here's one in layman's terms.) A collaboration between Hyperdimension Neptunia creators Idea Factory/Compile Heart, and Bullet Girls series developers SHADE Inc, Gun Gun Pixies is an action-platformer-shooter developed for the Playstation Vita.

Gun Gun Pixies is a game about a pair of pixie girls inhabiting a girl's dorm, observing their behaviors and solving their problems, all while remaining undetected. You're tiny, and the dorm girls are huge in comparison. The game has a nice sense of scale. You'll learn routes to platform around the game's rooms, avoid detection, collect coins and intel, and shoot down little squid enemies (that literally look like condoms, again, horny). It's not all that great though.

For one thing, the controls are extremely sensitive. You can change the sensitivity of the camera, but your character will always move at a highly brisk pace. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if the platforming didn't require a decent bit of precision, and the fact that you can die instantly due to falling from too high up doesn't help matters either.

That being said, the game is unashamedly horny, to an extreme that makes it funny, in my eyes. There are boss battles where the girls are doing outrageous(ly horny) things, and you have to pump them full of happy bullets in order to make them orgas--I MEAN, get exhausted and calm down. A run-and-gun boss fight against a kaiju giantess. I think I can name like, one other game that's done something like that. The game's just really voyeuristic in nature. Of COURSE all the girls wear skirts, so you'll constantly be looking up at their panties as you go about your business. The characters themselves and their relationships are actually pretty charming, especially the pixies themselves.

Sexy games with a lot of tongue-in-cheek humor are absolutely my guilty pleasure, and it's why I can't pass on Gun Gun Pixies, even with its glaring flaws. If you want to live out your giantess/voyuerism fantasies, this game is right up your alley. If you're looking for something with quality gameplay, you may wanna pass if you aren't in it for the horny.

(This is a review of the single-player content, seeing as at the time of writing this, the servers are temporarily down until they can weed out the hackers.)

I had always heard great things about LittleBigPlanet. Having experienced Tearaway first (and adoring it), and being there for the official launch of Dreams, I can vouch for Media Molecule's raw creative talent as a studio. Thankfully, I can see that influence shining through just as brightly here too.

The whole game gives off an organic, arts-and-crafts feeling, and an infectious aura of creativity. Stephen Fry's tutorial narration is simply magical, and the whole game just has a cozy, handmade feel to it.

The campaign of levels that Media Molecule packed in are an excellent showcase of just what you can create in LBP, as well as being enjoyable to play and explore. However, I do have a few qualms with it. The jumping and physics can feel pretty unpredictable at times, and that's the last thing I want to be experiencing in a 2D platformer. The other thing is how all checkpoints only have three extra lives. If you use those up, it'll kick you back to the start of the entire stage. With several of the stages being fairly lengthy, combined with the occasional unfair death due to janky platforming, it can definitely lead to quite a few rage-inducing moments.

Even still, I definitely enjoyed this game. While I hope to dive into the community-driven content at some point (what the game is known for), this was a fun game to breeze through.

I don't have any nostalgia for the original Pokemon Snap on the N64, but being fed up with the stiff, lifeless, recycled animations in the mainline Pokemon games was enough reason for me to get excited for this game. I wanted to see Pokemon in their natural environments, acting like actual, real creatures. In that regard, this game went above and beyond, with a few gameplay stumbles.

New Pokemon Snap is an on-rails shooter-styled game, except your weapon of choice is a camera and a few other contraptions. Interact with your environment/the Pokemon in creative ways, and take some creative pictures on a variety of stages. The "Illumina Pokemon" stages in particular even serve as unique "boss fights" to break up the pace.

The game's biggest stumbling points are the game's length, and its progression system. It's often unclear what criteria you need to meet in order to unlock the next stage. The game has a decent selection of stages, plus variants for each stage. You unlock these via increasing the "research level" for a specific stage, by playing it several times over. That's something you'll be doing naturally anyways, but it still feels like it takes FOREVER for a research level to go up.

Minor grievances aside, this game is excellent. It may not be for everyone, but it's breathed new life into a series that I had begun to think wasn't any good anymore. I like it.

Vanquish is an odd beast. Its story barely makes any sense, but it's so wild and hilarious that it doesn't really need to. A boost/bullet-time gauge and a plethora of weapons encourages fast and dangerous playstyles in a cover-shooter. But despite it all, it's genuinely a great time, albeit quite short.

The only real issues I had with the game were how weapons upgraded, and how your health works. Having to grab multiple duplicates of weapons while your ammo is full really causes you to fall into a trap of using a few specific weapons for the whole game, even if other weapons would be better options in given situations.

This game has that shooter trope of "your health recharges when you're not taking damage", and all that has ever done for me is make it extremely unclear how close to death I really am. Granted, you'll reach critical health or die quickly in Vanquish, but a health gauge to match your boost gauge would've been nice too.

Also, the loading screens have text blurbs that expand upon the game's characters/lore, but alas, my computer is not a 7th gen console, and the game loads in one second flat, before I get the chance to read anything. There also aren't very many secrets or unlockables, which seems odd for a Platinum game, but a highly linear adventure isn't always a bad thing.

Platinum's take on the third-person cover-shooter is definitely a cult classic in my eyes. If you haven't played it, you're definitely missing out. You can even get it on current-gen consoles and PC, you basically have no excuse. Pick it up and give it a shot.

The minigames in this one are still that nice blend of simplicity and technique, following series tradition. Unfortunately, this game is too lightweight for its own good.

The story is kinda cute, but it's fairly boring in execution and writing. I do really like visiting all of the nicely rendered areas and landmarks. Presentation doesn't disappoint, it's never really been a problem with the Mario and Sonic games.

The real issue I have is how "Dream Events" have mostly been phased out in favor of demake/NES-styled "Tokyo 1964" games. Their simplicity is charming, but it also wears off extremely quickly. It is also extremely weird to see the 16-bit Sonic sprites alongside the entirely 8-bit everything else, it clashes really hard.

All in all, it's an extremely short and lackluster collection of minigames for $60. I'd honestly recommend either the London or Winter Games on the Wii over this one. Much more fanservice and content to sink your teeth into.

Also, Sega. Please stop trying to make "The Deadly Six" be a thing that sticks around. We all want to forget. You don't need to insist on bringing them back. Quit it.

Unironically one of the more underrated/overlooked games on the Wii, and basically the only good Rabbids game (for the time anyways, Kingdom Battle exists now, but I don't care about Mario XCOM).

Rabbids Go Home is an unorthodox 3D platformer where you steal and hoard as much junk as Rabbidly possible, in an attempt to create a junk pile that reaches all the way to the moon.

You steal all this junk from an idealistic city plagued by consumerism, where everyone's perfectly happy with the status quo. In come the Rabbids, chaos incarnate, and the dichotomy between the two is what makes the Rabbids work in this setting. As the variety of the stuff you steal becomes more elaborate, so too do the humans' methods of retaliation. The game is filled to the brim with dark humor (turn on those subtitles!), giving the game a nice edge to it as well.

The music is fantastic, specifically the Rabbids' music. The humans enjoy listening to popular licensed music that's easy on the ears, but the Rabbids come bursting in with a batshit insane brass ensemble.

Overall, it's a great game to experience at least once. Stage variety is nice, although some concepts get re-used by the end of the game. Honestly enjoyed this more than I had any right to. I hate the Rabbids, but this game is ok in my book.

Monster Hunter Stories 2 is a fantastic RPG spinoff of the Monster Hunter series, where instead of simply fighting monsters, you also fight alongside them.

Firstly, the jump to hardware stronger than the 3DS has done wonders for the visuals. The areas are sprawling, the draw distance is great, and the colors really pop. The character/monster models use what looks to me like cel-shading, and it just looks fantastic. A point of contention would be the framerate. If you're on PC, the game should run at a rock-solid 60 FPS, but it can fluctuate a decent bit on the Switch. I mentally tuned it out after a while, but I know several people made a stink about it on social media.

The game's story can feel a bit cliche at times, but I feel like it benefits a game like this. The English dub feels like it lacks direction occasionally, but the characters are still a lot of fun to be around. However, the story structure isn't all that, in my opinion. It usually boils down to "go here and defeat this, now go here and defeat this, now go here and defeat this, now move on to the next area and do all that again". It's not the worst thing in the world, but it did cause the game to drag occasionally.

The gameplay is solid fun. Peeking into monster dens and stealing their eggs is always fun, using your monsters' abilities to traverse the environment feels natural, and the battle system is both simple to use, but has a decent amount of hidden depth to consider while playing.

Recognizing monster attack patterns and reacting to them is the name of the game, but with a turn-based twist. You have three types of standard attacks (Speed, Power, and Technical) that work in a FE weapon triangle pattern. Your own monsters have a type of attack they tend to use, but you don't have direct control over them, so it becomes a matter of syncing yourself up with your monster, or giving them a nudge in the right direction by expending some of your kinship meter (MP, essentially). It all comes together in a battle system that manages to feel just as engaging as the real-time fights of the mainline Monster Hunter games, despite being turn-based.

Overall, this is one of my favorite games to come out so far this year, and probably one of my favorite RPGs, period. I never expected a sequel to such a niche 3DS spinoff to happen, but I'm so, SO glad it did. Please give this game a shot. There's a demo for it on both Switch and PC, and they let you transfer your save data to the full version. Can't wait to return to this game for postgame shenanigans.

This game made my fingers feel like a pretzel. It feels like a modern-day rendition of QWOP, but this time with lush environments, an extremely catchy soundtrack by David Wise, and an adorable cartoon snake.

The game's main draw is its unorthodox control scheme, and how the levels are built around being a snake. All of the levels are inventive in their own way, and all have a smattering of collectibles to find along the way. Unfortunately, many of the later stages really felt like they began to overstay their welcome, and there's only 15 levels on top of that, so the game is simultaneously too short AND exhausting to play.

I'd say this game is still worth a shot, but I can tell it won't click with a lot of people. I still enjoyed myself though.

Being a fan of the entire Metal Gear Solid series definitely put my expectations fairly high going into this game. While it has a few constant flaws that irritate me, I came out of this game with a positive outlook.

The game's 2002 visuals hold up surprisingly well, specifically the fantastic lighting. Not much to speak of in the way of music, but it's not bad for a stealth game to go with the ambience approach.

Going off the game's lighting, I adore the game's emphasis on sticking to the shadows to reduce visibility. If there's no darkness, it may behoove you to make your own by shooting out nearby lights. Aside from the shadows, Sam's toolkit is massive and varied, and just fun to toy around with. The game's stages are full of unique setpieces and challenges, never a dull moment.

Unfortunately, the game can't help but shine a spotlight on some of its more glaring flaws. Sam's melee attack feels extremely unreliable at times, you never know if it's going to result in your guard being knocked out, stunned (and alerted), or simply turn to point their gun at your head. When one guard is alerted, the rest of them tend to act like a damn hivemind, immediately ganging up on you. It doesn't help that Sam will die in a handful of shots anyways, makes me wonder why there's a health bar in the first place. Compounding on all of that, some of the game's setpieces are mandatory firefights, where the combination of Sam's non-existent health and gun controls that don't feel like they were made for combat culminate in fairly frustrating sections.

Phew. Thank god for quicksaves.

That last paragraph might make it seem like I disliked this game, but I didn't, I admire it. Dedicated stealth games are hard to come by, and this one is really damn solid (GET IT???), even despite glaring flaws. I can only hope and assume that future games used this one as a foundation to create even better sequels.