Played on N64 Switch Online.

I'll never understand why given all the potential things you could do with the premise of a golf game set in the Super Mario universe, they chose to not do anything interesting and just make this bland thing. Even the mini golf courses are just courses in the shapes of numbers and letters. I can't even give this the excuse of being an early golf game because Kirby's Dream Course came out on the SNES and utilizes the Kirby universe perfectly, and it's probably the single best golf game because of it! 1 star because I can make Peach call my opponent a whore.

I get why people are rating this lower, but I feel like people have forgotten how groundbreaking this game was in 2007. The Ubisoft Open World Game™ has become a tired trope nowadays, but this was the game that pioneered it and well, they've copied that formula into all of their other games because it worked. Going around an open world, being able to climb anything, blending into massive crowd sizes on a scale that hadn't been seen before, was all really cool. Not to mention the more realistic aspects of instant counter kills on enemies and not being able to take too many hits yourself. All of the assassination missions were really cool as well. Letting you scope out your environment to plan the perfect kill, being able to choose if you approach aggressively or in stealth, and some cool chase sequences if you make a mistake. Ubisoft also goes to great lengths to faithfully recreate the locations and time period these games are set in, which I personally find to be one of the coolest things about them, and is certainly a level of detail they didn't have to go into, but the extra mile makes it all the better I think.. The lore of the assassins I also thought was kind of neat in this game. It takes place so far in the past that the writers were kind of able to go "Well we're not completely sure how these guys died, and there were rumors of an organization of assassins back then, so there could be some degree of historical truth to this." It's something I thought worked in this game that once you get to the sequel's pope fist fight, and AC 3's codexes just straight up telling you this isn't how it went down, just gets ridiculous. Really I'm only deducting half a star from this because its sequel two years later would improve on this game's strong foundation so well.

Giving this one 4 stars because of how groundbreaking it was for its time. Miyamoto taking inspirations from his adventures in rural Japan to make this open ended adventure game, really expanded the realm of what games could do. While dated now, a lot of people back in the day got a real sense of wonder and discovery from this that simply wasn't available from other games at the time; often making hand drawn maps of the world to keep track of their progress. The only reason I deduct a star is because even for the time, I feel like some of what you need to do is so obscure that you basically needed a Nintendo Power subscription or a friend to tell you how to proceed, which is a little taste of the early days of predatory game design.

The proto-God of War in that it's another franchise reboot that really wants to be a Naughty Dog game but fails in some key ways. In fact, this game wants to be two Naughty Dog games simultaneously. In it's attempt to have both the high energy adventurous spirit of Uncharted, and also the dark survivalism of The Last of Us, it confuses the tone of both its gameplay and its narrative.

The game starts off with a shipwreck as Lara and crew are trapped on an island. As an origin story for the character, the player is inexperienced and must scavenge and find ways to survive a harsh wilderness. Eventually you run into some guys who capture you and eventually this leads to your first time killing another person. Lara is traumatized by this event for all of 30 seconds, before the cutscene is over and she then proceeds to ruthlessly murder every single person on this island without batting an eye.

This is where the game turns into Uncharted and the previous survival elements are rarely if ever seen again. And as an Uncharted game, it isn't even particularly great. Yes, the shooting and the platforming all feel up to par with Uncharted. However, none of the scenarios Lara is put in gave me any thrills I hadn't already previously experienced in Uncharted. And as Lara is doing all of this Uncharted stuff, the visual language of the game, particularly in the cutscenes, are still trying to tell me it's a dark and gritty survival game, but the game itself want me to be thrilled like I'm watching an Indiana Jones movie.

As for the titular Tombs that are being Raided, even the puzzles in this game are dumbed down from previous entries. The one thing this game could've tried to do to give itself its own sense of identity is gone now. Instead we have optional tombs that offer no challenge whatsoever. Overall, I'd give this muddled game a hard pass and just replay one of the Uncharted or The Last of Us games, depending on the kind of experience you're looking for.

This is a game about collecting and telling stories, and watching them change and grow with each retelling. You play as a drifter during the dust bowl, although time is a little wonky in this game so not everything is tied down to that era. This game's biggest strength is that they intentionally hired many writers from diverse backgrounds to write the game's diverse cast of characters. The main characters you talk to can range from a preacher, a sharecropper, a war veteran, a union organizer, the list goes on. The game spans the entirety of the continental United States and regions have their own distinct feel to them. You'll collect a wide variety of stories, some hopeful, some not, some happy, some sad, and one of the most interesting parts of this game to me was how you'll collect folk tales like The Jersey Devil, but also historical tales like police busting up unions. It gives a real sense that the class struggle in the United States is just as integral to its culture as any traditional folk tale.

Onrush is a racing game without a finish line. Instead of trying to just be the fastest person on the track, Onrush pits 2 teams of 6 against each other in objective based matches. So for example one of the modes has a moving circle, and whichever team has the most drivers in that circle begins to take it to score a point, another mode has you trying to use more boost than the other team to win. It also has class based vehicles with different abilities to make matches more interesting, examples include a car that can give boost to teammates nearby, a motorcycle that drains boost from nearby enemies, one of the motorcycles is basically out of Tron leaving a trail of death behind them. This is something I think it'd be really cool to see more games try out, to expand the racing genre beyond who gets across the line the fastest, it has potential to be a whole genre of its own. The only reason I have this as "shelved" is because I'm literally one trophy away from the platinum, so I may return to get that at some point.

This was one of my top 10 games of 2018 primarily because the main hook and premise of the game is so creative and has so much possibility. This is a multiplayer dating game, where you and up to 3 friends play as monsters trying to get other monsters to go to the prom with you. You can be as cooperative or as competitive as you'd like in this game. There is definitely some problematic writing in this game, for example the character most associated with the "fun" stat is super into hard drugs, but the game being multiplayer makes it easier to just kind of laugh stuff off and have fun with people. I'd really like to see this type of game expand into a larger genre, because there's so much untapped potential in having a multiplayer game based around dialogue systems.