Pretty great Pokemon game. I never played Colosseum but as far as I can tell, this sequel improves upon the gameplay so vastly. If you’ve been searching for an official shakeup to the mainline formula, this is a fantastic option. It’s fun to have your team built around Pokémon that you snag from others. The game only having double battles is such a major boon for the strategic depth of this adventure, it genuinely makes me wish we’d get another game where the main story is all doubles.

One of the game’s biggest assets also happens to be one of its biggest flaws. The battle animations are enthralling, fun to watch, and full of life. However, without the option to turn them off, halfway through the playthrough they start to feel like they’re lasting waaaay too long and easily make up for a good chunk of the playtime.

I still give this my recommendation, but if you have the means to throttle the game speed, you’ll enjoy it even more.

THE BINDING OF ISAAC WARP ZONE: S H A R D S O F I S A A C

The Binding of Isaac Rebirth is my favorite game of all time. But what about the original, programmed in AS2 rather than C++? While I did play Rebirth first, this review series would be a bit incomplete without mentioning the original, no? Flash was made by a much smaller team than Rebirth, composed of solely Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, with music provided by Danny B. Flash was worked on for the course of several months, but it was considerably rushed and generally unpolished, even to this day. Even then, it still attracted a large audience, even to this day, where it still gets about a hundred players daily. Is this for good reason? Perhaps Flash has something that Rebirth (and subsequent versions) don’t? Only one way to find out! So let's hop in this old ass Basement and check out what old Isaac has to offer.

Right off the bat, there's a few noticeable differences between this and Rebirth. First off, the artstyle and music. Compared to Rebirth, the game sports a hand-drawn artstyle, and a different music genre entirely, compared to Rebirth's pixel style graphics and hard Rock. In terms of graphics, Flash is just as strong, arguably stronger than its Rebirth cousin, as grotesque as ever, gore, piss, and shit all left intact. However, when it comes to the music, it's a fair bit debatable. Flash’s soundtrack goes for a more electronic style, with its music focusing more on the beat of the tracks compared to Rebirth. Meanwhile, Rebirth (and subsequent DLCs) have a very heavy focus on leitmotifs and melodies. It’s a bit of a tossup as to which one I prefer, but even though I find myself leaning towards Rebirth’s soundtrack more, Flash’s soundtrack is pretty good as well. All of these tunes are all time classics, with Repentant being my personal favorite track in the game. The boss tracks aren’t as great as Rebirth’s, but they’re still pretty banging here. The songs do feel a little short, but granted Flash’s limitations, it’s understandable. But what about the gameplay itself?

Rebirth is about the same as Flash, control-wise. You still move and shoot in four directions the same way you do as Rebirth, place bombs and use cards like you do in Rebirth. But, there's a bit of an issue… Where the fuck is the controller support? This is one of the unfortunate downsides of the game being programmed in Flash. Because Flash lacks any support of native gamepad support, you have to use a program called Joy2Key to even try to use a controller. And even then, the controls don't translate the best, because the movement isn't analog. And on that note, I found, even on a keyboard, the controls were pretty damn sensitive. Isaac instantly darts with a tap of WASD, and it feels mediocre, especially compared to Rebirth. Shooting feels just as good as possible, which is nice, but I can't help but feel the controls are just too janky for my tastes.

On the topic of gameplay and story itself, Flash still holds up pretty well, as much as Rebirth did. For a more complete gameplay overview, I highly suggest reading my Rebirth review, but the gist of the game is that “Mom tries to kill Isaac but that's not really what happens”, the player goes through randomly generated dungeons, collects items upon the way, and defeats supernatural creatures at the end of each floor before moving on. Avoiding damage is key to success, as you can achieve Devil deals which significantly power up your character. It's just as fun here as it was in Rebirth. Obviously, there's a lot less content here as there is in Rebirth, it being an older version of the beloved classic, but I really appreciated the balancing here. The game is a fair bit more difficult than Rebirth, but a lot less focus is placed on the items and more so the challenge, and it does that very well. Flash provides a consistent challenge from beginning to end, and I am all here for it. But said challenge comes at a bit of a cost, and one of the main reasons why I spring towards Rebirth rather than Flash. I love Flash, I think it's great, but where the hell is the content? Flash is a really fun game hampered by a lack of run variety, making the game become way more stale than Rebirth and future iterations. In Flash, there are a little over a hundred items, and before a Halloween Update, there were about 80, a disappointing amount compared to Rebirth's 300. And the items present at best aren't as innovative as even Rebirth’s worst. Each run is pretty similar for the most part. Find stat ups, maybe flight or one or two tear modifiers, a few useless passives, a half-decent activated item, and bam. Run’s over before you know it. Flash also suffers from a lack of synergies, another unfortunate consequence of Flash as a programming language, adding to the issues of a lack of run variety. And those issues of content don't just apply to items as well.

Flash also suffers from a lack of final bosses and floors. It's almost customary for any roguelike to have a super secret ending that's really difficult to achieve (Hell from Spelunky, Throne II in Nuclear Throne, and so on), but Flash really only has Satan to its fairly small name. And that was added in a patch, as base release simply… ended. Without any major conclusion. But Satan himself isn't really that difficult, either. A step up from previous floors, but far from difficult to get. And having him be a random spawn pre-It Lives kind of takes the oomph out of him being the “true ending”. He isn't labeled as such, but I feel that's what they were going for.

Now, with all that being said, you might be wondering why I rated Flash a 8/10. Well, that's because Flash is still a REALLY good game, just as not as good as Rebirth. Like I said at the beginning, it's still as fundamentally great as what comes after it, but I hold a heavy preference towards Rebirth. It’s a very small, yet focused game, and while I appreciate that, it really needed more content to warrant spending more than a few wins on it (in my opinion). However, almost all of my problems with it would be fixed WITH…


“Within the past grasps / All familiar faces surround / My life is rebound” - “Flash” by zeusdeegoose, Written on 4/22/24

I played this as a multiplayer campaign with my friend. It was very engaging and fun for the most part, with the different vehicles, weapons, enemy types, and challenges constantly keeping the playthrough fresh. That is, until Mission 7 where the latter half of the game isn't as sharply designed, with long repetitive sections of shooting through groups of enemies in a hall or simply retreading an old level. Plus, the Flood enemies can sometimes feel a bit too damage-sponge-y and take really long to take down.

The feeling of the earlier levels, the story, and the high of racing to the end in the Warthog was such a blast though, that I need to give this game credit for it. I'd recommend playing this with a friend, undoubtedly.

Felt like updating my review, as the Synchrony DLC has since come out of early access.
In my original review, I complained about the new 4.0 engine's quirks and nuances. I picked up the game in 2017, just after Amplified came out, and I got really familiar with the game. It has the second highest playtime on my steam page (and I put over 200 hours into the switch version too.) So, when the new engine came around, the small changes really bothered me.

Certain exploits, glitches, or even basic interactions were changed as the game was essentially rebuilt. Most of them have been addressed and reinstated since early access, and I am not as frustrated as I was originally with the changes. Plus, there is a new legacy option to play with the old engine, something I had wished for in my old review. It's the best of both worlds! The online cross-play that Synchrony offers is genuinely really cool.

Necrodancer was such a unique take on the rogue like formula at the time, and it took hold of my life. I have many memories with it and it changed the way I look at both rhythm games and rogue likes. In hindsight, it seems obvious that old turn based rogue likes could be adapted into a rhythm game: your hand is forced to make a move before you are ready, your strategy always shifting and changing just like the enemies around you. It's such a thrilling grind, pulsing with the tunes of legendary indie composer Danny Baranowsky. It's hard to describe how Necrodancer makes me feel.

The learning curve is steep. VERY steep. There is an excellent video essay describing why Necrodancer has one of the hardest PS4 platinums. Not to mention that both Amplified and Synchrony have their own achievements too! However, I would argue that it is simple to pick up and learn. Anyone can beat Cadence with a little practice and patience!

The mechanics are brilliant. The music is top notch. I'll never be able to get all the achievements, but the grind is extremely addicting!

I have struggled for quite some time now to articulate my feelings for this game.

It is a very simple game to describe literally - there’s no dialogue, no direct story, and no stated objective besides “explore and collect effects.” The worlds are very often abstract and mostly barren, only containing a few choice landmarks that you have to navigate around to find new landmarks, with many maps looping around on themselves, and backgrounds that scroll across the screen. The length of the song accompanying the world you’re in is, on average, less than 10 seconds. Despite- and dare I say because of this odd atmosphere, I was totally immersed. On an aesthetic level, I would describe Yume Nikki as being less of an attempt to recreate any specific dreams and more like a game about exploring the abstract idea of dream worlds which are not bound by conventional logic and exist as a pure stream of unconscious thought; the places you explore simply “are” and do not try to justify or explain their existence. Yume Nikki on a gameplay level was enjoyable because I was able to just toss away my preconceived notions of what to expect out of a game and simply explore an interconnected world towards “nowhere in particular” to see what happens with total freedom, using effects I collected purely for fun.

A lot of the qualities that make the game great to me feel at odds with its status as an indie darling. One of the reasons why is because it is often misplaced on a very similar pedestal to much more conventional indie games despite being very little like them. Either that, or it is compared to “walking simulators” and dismissed as pretentious or simply boring - I definitely assumed it was in the latter group, and have been aware of the game for many years before finally becoming interested in playing it.

Another issue is that because the game is so well-documented, players now have an incentive to just turn to the internet to look up things to do when they get stuck; should you play this game, I suggest you hold off from doing this as long as you can bear to. Once you start using walkthroughs, this game’s nonlinear quality starts to become lost. The one I ended up using only shows you what door an effect lies behind, but even this somewhat turned this game into a much more linear experience for me. I would go as far as to say that I kind of wish there wasn’t an ending, because it creates incentive to “complete” the game, rather than just letting the player decide they want to stop exploring on their own terms.

On the other side of the Yume Nikki being popular, its status has led to the creation of a vast amount of works that I have found myself either passively or actively influenced by. Notable fan works that are big reasons I finally checked this game out are “Yume 2kki Online” a much larger MMO dream exploration game that is comprised entirely of community-made maps, effects, music, etc., and “Yume Nikki: Between The Lines” which is a fan album remixing many of the game’s tracks in a way that I find pretty fitting to the loopy feeling of the original songs, or occasionally making larger divergences from the original track that feel like musical tributes to Yume Nikki as a whole. After having engaged with these for a few months, as well as having been a fan of some of the numerous games that cite YN as an inspiration, it feels great to have finally experienced the source of these inspirations.

It is honestly quite impressive that a game this slow paced and simplistic kept me hooked for so many hours while playing and thinking about it for so many hours both before and after playing it, when I have been bored to death by much more stimulating games. Despite its popularity, though, I do not think this game is for everybody - in fact it is rather niche, and I wouldn’t pass judgement onto people who didn’t care for it. There is basically no commitment to trying it other than your time though, so I may as well say it’s worth taking a look at even if you don’t stick around with it for very long.

I do not personally think this is the best 2D Mario game. I do, however, consider it a massive step above anything the New Super Mario Bros series was up to. NSMB feels like store brand Mario; the core concept of a Mario game's identity abstracted away to a generic representation of it - "Fruity Pebbles" becomes "Fruit Flakes." I would not say the same of this game.

Super Mario Bros Wonder... is incredibly silly. It is silly in a way I cannot say I was always vibing with, but always found endearing. It doesn't feel like "Mario for challenge-seeking epic gamer adults" and I don't mind personally, and didn't expect it to be. The characters look and move much more cartoonishly than in other games. There's a lot more visual flair and effects going on when something happens in the game - powerup pickups play unique animations, enemies do a gesture of comradery when they bump into one another, flashing comic-like action shapes appear when stuff gets hit. There's stupid ass flowers that say the corniest shit when you walk by them, and I love it (I heard a lot of fears of them being very "that just happened" and yes they do lampshade like that sometimes. Usually they are fine and occasionally they are funny).

Levels stand out a lot more by being given a title and sub-title, alongside having much more defining central gimmicks. Aesthetically the worlds levels reside in feel like much more distinct locations than the worlds in NSMB, though admittedly they do still end up having the same abstract world-theme archetypes. Each world has a sort of macro-gimmick with how levels are laid out: the desert has many hidden levels, the magma swamp has many layers and stages scattered about, the petal isles is the access point for the other worlds in the game and you come back to it often to play a few of its stages between each world. To compare, I played NSMB Wii about a few months before this and cannot recall any particular details about the average stage within it.

One of the major mechanics introduced to this game is the badge system. In concept, this is a cool system that gives a ton of playstyle variance. In practice, most of the badges are too intrusive to normal gameplay and I only ended up using the spin jump badge with the dolphin kick badge as a backup for water levels. There are other badges for things like powerup spawn restriction and collectable locators - I basically never touched these nor felt they were worthwhile. The game has about 2 dedicated stages for each of the movement-altering badges which locks you to that badge. These stages are pretty fun and are designed pretty neatly around the badges, but honestly they were so short they left me aching for more of the main levels to just require and be designed around the usage of a particular badge in the same vein as these challenges.

Ok so, the difficulty. This is a kid's game; it's easy. Mind you, I found this pretty engaging despite the levels never requiring too much of me skill-wise. But, still, it is just a little TOO easy. I wouldn't care about the main game being easy if the special world provided a substantial challenge, but it feels like even that world is a cake walk in comparison to other "special world"s I've played. The levels in world special are VERY short, so even when they are actually difficult there is not too much friction to see them through to the end and get all of the collectables. I beat "The Final Test" in two tries, and that's not supposed to be a flex. I'm not bragging - I am genuinely under the impression that this level's difficulty was very undercooked. Maybe I just fluked and performed exceptionally well and the level is actually pretty difficult. But for a "gauntlet" it felt awfully short as well!

After this I checked to see if there was a super-secret final level, and there was indeed... but I would have to replay most of the game to pick up the random one-off goalpost tops and/or big purple coins I missed.. I almost decided to just pick up another game sitting in my backlog, but stuck out the grind out of curiosity. Oh man, it was worth it. The payoff is a marathon of my favorite level archetype: the badge challenges. And this one was actually hard! It even got me starting to worry that my first Mario Wonder Game Over was approaching! I definitely would have run out of lives if not for the checkpoints. It is somewhat unfortunate that the only serious challenge the game had to offer was at the absolute ending, and even then felt way less harsh than its contemporary 99.9%-completion challenge levels from other Mario games. That being said, though, I was enthralled to play it and it was a big high note for me to finish the game on.

I consider Mario Wonder to be a pretty solid game through-and-through. There were never any serious lows despite the lack of extreme highs I have gotten from other platforming games. I would recommend this game if someone was telling me they were already interested in playing it, but I wouldn't recommend it out of the blue, if that makes sense.