Without ignoring that this is a Japanese story told by white people, I will say that I loved the story of 'Ghost of Tsushima.' It plays out like 'The Avengers' as you are introduced to great personalities through the game and then they come together as a team.

This may be the most gorgeous game I've ever played or at least in the top few. I loved exploring the world. I loved the sword and bow combat systems. I do think 'Ghost of Tsushima' falls short of a title like 'The Witcher III' on account of its missions being nearly all of a single type: wipe out all the Mongols in village X. I admit that it was fun everytime, but more variation in mission types would have been appreciated.

I was surprised to learn that this is a substantial, and essential, 3D Mario platformer. I think it also gives a glimpse at a way forward for the series. It is a truly open-world platformer the likes of which I've never played before. I was also surprised that it is, in a lot of ways, a spiritual successor to 'Super Mario Sunshine.'

I'm not sure the Fury Bowser mechanic works all the way through the game. In the post-game (after 50 shines), when shines become fewer and farther between, he got to be an annoyance. One way to get a very short break from him is to let yourself get killed, which doesn't seem like an intended solution. If you decide to fight him to make him go away, you have to play all the way through the multiple phases of battle and rewatch the end credits before continuing your game and, even still, it's only a matter of minutes before he shows up again.

I'm bad at video games, so beating this on Ultra-violence difficulty with auto-aim turned off makes me feel like I'm on top of the world. And that's only difficulty level 3 out of 5. But this game is so tight, you always want to try again. You constantly feel like you can do better than you just did.

This is how I want my first-person shooters to play. Double jumps, mid-air dashes, and constantly in motion. I love that how you kill determines what the demon drops. Awesome weapons, awesome music, awesome game.

I played this entirely in VR and it is the stuff of lifelong dreams coming true. I appreciate how complex the controls are and how much control you actually have over your ship while flying. This goes far beyond the dogfighting sequences of the Battlefront games. Some of the mission objectives were confusing because your understanding of the space battle is limited to a very simple radar and what you can see out your windows. But I felt right there in the incredible action of Star Wars space battles.