Wow, I repressed that I played this for the five straight months I've been on this site. Solid sim buried in layers of an exploitative trash heap and topped with the disappointment that older games still get the loop better.

Like, what in the fuck are the roulettes? How many times do you need to pretend you COULD give me a fucking car and then give me pocket lint until you idiot asshats think we're too dumb to catch on? You couldn't just give us the second-worst option and put it next to a steaming turd every time to make us feel just a little less damaged for playing the game? Who the fuck at Sony okayed this septic tank of modern game design? Dark shoutout to the random jump in volume every roulette it gives you tree-fiddy credits, WHOOOOAAAAAAAA

Yes, the backtracking is a bit padded and annoying - even with the updates - and yes, the characters brazenly point it out. Yes, Bowser's butt monkey phase stuck in our mouths a bit too long after this. Yes, it's a shame the updated graphics didn't get a nice 60 FPS treatment to go along with them. Yes, I had this in the back of my head as "that game that accidentally turned me into an internet gremlin 20 years ago"; I expected that I'd bought this remake as a little nostalgia romp to reminisce, enjoy the vibes of a game that runs entirely on vibes, and shelve it again.

But nah, this fuckin script is so good, man. Paper Mario 64 out-Marios this with pristine charm, and Super Mario RPG is more... RPG...-y. But this game never strains to outdo either, and it ends up better at both. All the standard JRPG dialogue to tell you where to go has just enough little tongue-in-cheek asides, lampshade mounts, brick jokes, and fourth wall breaks peppered in to keep your eyes on each and every dialogue line, Tattle, and signpost. It lets Mario run free as a pastiche of himself; that deviation could've come across as grimy as the town it starts in - if it ever tilted into a level of smarmy, self-fellating self-reference*. But it doesn't. It keeps convincing you to believe in it anyway, and that bastion of monumental Mario consistency stands right behind the actual gameplay. The love for setting the mood and adventure keeps the heart, even as it occasionally stops to literally rip something to shreds.

After I played Paper Mario and TTYD as a kid, I tried to play a ton of other RPGs. I didn't like most of em - but I thought it was because they lost that interactive bit in the battle system. I get why now! You know what's a better gameplay loop that I'll fall for, every time, far more than numbers going up? Make me think I might laugh every time I hit a button.

I thought I remembered know what's around every corner. I don't. When I don't, I cackle. When I do, I still cackle. It loves itself for what it is. I love it.

(Also, y'know, gimme some of those numbers going up. As a treat.)

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* Sometimes I wonder if Miyamoto saw the series going here and jerked too hard backwards to restricting Sticker Star's creativity. They say restrictions breed creativity! Here's a creative idea for a restriction: restrict Miyamoto to a dungeon and let the team create their own fucking game

Imagine a John Hughes-ish romcom, but you're the kid who's down on their luck. Shinji Mikami doesn't notice you, and I'm the asshole he's going out with. Mikami spends all this time making Hi-Fi Rush for me, and it's filled with love - but when no one is looking I shrug and throw it in the trash. YOU see it. So when the prom night comes, I'm trying to convince Mikami to make another horror game, and he's like noooo stooop so you come up and punch me in the face and then you make out with 80's music playing in the background. Quick time events pop up every time you add tongue.

Anyway my point is, even though I inexplicably do not like this game I would appreciate it if you do not punch me. But if you do, please get the closest knockoff of Andrew Keegan to portray me in the cast

There's a lot I could shotgun blabber about how much I adore Animal Well, but I think what's personally flooring me is Billy Basso's fluency in our language here.

Back when I was a kid I developed an ironic phobia of computer programs acting on their own, and it manifested itself into a hilarious curiosity for games that really screw with player expectations and UI affordances - DDLC, Pony Island, etc. Very few seem to really convey that a jumpscare isn't the thing that's deeply unsettling; it's that gap between expectation of a game's rules and, by extension, the apparent limits. A game has a framework with discrete inputs, display elements, and sound effects, so to knock the framework down is a good "scare" and one that begs the player to wonder what else could happen. But to keep it going the length of a narrative requires deeper understanding of a player's mind once they're on the defensive, the ability to pace the novelties neither too slow nor fast, and the chops to keep that story memorable past a string of funhouse tricks.

Animal Well does it. It's not just that it's a fun puzzle game - I adore it because it's a puzzle game juxtaposing the jaw-drop when an item's depth becomes apparent against horror elements; a pixel art backdrop with worms that have two-sprite animations and bloop sound effects against a smoothly-animated, human-moaning death machine; simple controls and Metroidvania platformer gameplay against ever-increasing gameplay dimensions in a game smaller than many DS cartridges that has to have exhausted everything at this point to a home stretch. Right? No.

I think Basso gets that the childlike wonder we chase in video games is often unsaid, in our heads, or between the CRT scanlines. In his first attempt to show us this, he beautifully said it in pure mechanics rather than through a lick of traditional dialogue. I love it, and I'm gonna devour anything he puts out next.

I've completed three or four randomizers of this game. I've lost count. Every time, there are two specific moments which I audibly say "oh fuck this game" out loud - it's either getting lost in Aquatic Mine (conveniently available as a first stage at least 2-3 times now), or it's when I have Shadow dramatically ramp off the first jump in Sky Rail, off the stage, into the kill plane, while the Chao Kindergarten music is playing, as Omochao starts talking about mating rituals, and Shadow reaches mach 5 to his death. Somewhere in the middle of this journey, my objections melt away as I figure out why the supposed boundaries of the game don't matter - I accidentally clip through a wall and realize I can use this knowledge to skip the Flame Ring. (Outer Wilds?? eat your fucking heart out???) A bunch of Chao drown themselves across a pond to the climatic Live and Learn, like their life depends on it. It does. By the end I'm on the verge of tears as Sonic says his heartfelt goodbye to Shadow: "NEED MORE MEMORY, BUD!"

What I'm saying is - even if you take this anxious mess of emblematic (ha!) 00's angst, cut it into scissors, smear a glue stick against a wall, chuck the pieces at it, then shoot an entire bottle of ketchup across it while blasting Jamiroquai, DMX, Pendulum, Streetlight Manifesto, and Foo Fighters all at the same time inside a moving car, it never crashes! You come out of it with a pending arrest warrant, but I swear it still ends up worth it and ready to go again. I don't know why! There's just something here, man. Something special.

The level design is so slapshot. Have you ever stopped running in the middle of the speed levels and looked at a broad view of what they... do? They're linear, and there are these big dash pads that they tell you to go this way, and the second you walk around one you look around and tell yourself "what the FUCK were they thinking?" Then the game suddenly jets Sonic in some direction because you happened upon the middle of some half-scripted segment, and the game asks you, "what the FUCK were you thinking?" But they probably realized people were doing this, so they made it non-linear by putting STUFF right in those sections. Instead of just moving along, eventually you're constantly looking for the places it fucks up! Guess what? There's SHIT there! Every time. There's a life! There's a lost Chao!! There's a fucking upgrade!!! There's a pipe in outer space and you whistle at it and a skunk pops out. God dammit. Brilliant.

This game is a pile of confetti ideas, and it's best every time you throw it up in the air and ignore the complete mess it makes. Suddenly you forget how the walker missions aren't designed around anything, and the emerald stages are horribly winding messes by choice, and the speed missions are designed around psychically predicting you'll be holding the analog stick in a particular direction even though the camera has no vestibular system, and that this jank is all desperately held together by tamogachis and kart racing. The aesthetic does a Weekend at Bernie's on the gameplay. The misplaced mix of edge and "what if we all just got along........." optimism shoots it through the fuckin door and into the horizon. It's incredible. I think about how much this game sucks every time I play it. By the end I'm laughing or crying. I can't tell which. I never care.

No one makes five different functional video games in one with umpteen different music directions starring an edgy antihero against jarring heavily-contrasted rainbow palettes. Why? Because it's stupid. And I love this stupid, stupid game so much.

This is the best implementation of mid-00's aesthetic - that mix of gritty, earthy, dark greens/blues/oranges and steel-neon cities out of a frutiger aero background. It whizzes by at 700 MPH, and it feels like it. It goes for pseudo-realism and it still looks good two decades later. How does it do it? The story mode is balls-disgusting hard, but with such quick hooks objectives and ever-teasing, escalating difficulties - you can't get through that door? that one boulder is gonna make you stop playing? - it dangles the carrot so well. Great fuckin soundtrack, and there's more than one person I know who got into electronic or ambient music from this. The characters are so distinctly goofy sci-fi, and they don't need to be there or fleshed out like they are, yet they are! And then there's the astronomically-high skill ceiling that's fun to watch, and fun to just graze every now and then with an absolutely perfect slide or snake before you absolutely eat shit off the track like Icarus. Anyone of any skill level can at least enjoy it.

I've been trying to stick all my five star rated games with some kinda commentary, but what is there to add here? Go play it! It speaks for itself. It's so effortlessly cool, such a tightly built game with grand feel, few flaws, and zero friction between it and its experience - just a raw test of skill, and people still keep pushing its limits year by year.

The ending arc is as jarring as everyone understandably criticizes it, but any narrative hangups I have are completely numbed by how good the mouthfeel, aesthetic, Bildungsroman, and little details are.

Every now and then I remember an apocryphal story I read somewhere about someone leaving Pixar's Coco down south when they saw an old granny crying "it's true! It's all true!" in Spanish as she exited the theater. That was me, but instead I exited this game crying over how beautifully it nailed the feel of rust belt PA. (Pretend I was screaming "yinz! yinz!" for full effect)